


I Used To Be A Stagecoach Driver, And Now I'm Not

by Prismatic Bell (Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor)



Category: Working at an Amusement Park -- Girl_from_the_crypt
Genre: Body Horror, Deal with a Devil, Ensemble Cast, Faeries Made Them Do It, Families of Choice, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Other, POV Character of Color, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 47,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24643165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor/pseuds/Prismatic%20Bell
Summary: After canon, Nathan has to get back to living life.Also, he has to save his best friend.
Comments: 38
Kudos: 27





	1. I'm Hired

Two weeks after it was all over, I found out it barely started.

I should probably explain. My name is Nathan. If you've read my friend Leah's posts, you already know some of what I've gone through. That's why today I found myself back in a place I swore I'd never go again. I thought I'd update you all, since things are even weirder than normal in this part of the world right now.

There are some things nobody tells you about trying to reclaim your identity after a decade of not existing. Like how to explain to the DMV why you don't have an ID to replace, for example. Or discovering that if you have two hundred bucks in the bank, and don't touch it for ten years, at the end of the ten years you'll have a whole two hundred and fifteen or so.

Also, you're really not going to want to go back home to see what your boyfriend's done with the place, and instead you'll end up living with a near-complete stranger. A very nice near-complete stranger who goes out of his way to help you readjust to being alive, but still.

And so after two weeks of hunting, I finally went back to the park.

Dale looked stunned when I showed up in his office. Not surprising, I guess. I rode in with Mitchell, but he apparently didn't think Dale deserved the heads up, and I still don't have a phone, so this morning it was just Mitchell checking in on the horses and me standing in front of Dale's desk while he stared at me with his mouth open and his coffee halfway to it, apparently forgotten. It occurred to me I was wearing another man's clothes, and wondered if he took it for what it is--I don't exactly have the money for a new wardrobe right now--or if he thought I might've slept with somebody else already. I'm pretty sure he knows otherwise, neither of us is the bed-hopping type--give credit where it's due, Dale is probably the most faithful man I've ever met--but that doesn't mean your mind doesn't do weird things to you, when you're not taking care of yourself.

“Let's start here,” I told him. “This isn't a reunion visit. I still don't know where we stand, not anymore. I do know nobody's looking to hire somebody with a ten-year gap in their employment history, and 'I drove a coach for ten years' doesn't really get you anywhere either. So. Do I still have a job? Or at least back pay?”

Dale looked like he hasn't been sleeping well since the whole trying-to-renegotiate-the-contract thing. I was trying very, very hard not to care about the bags under his eyes and the lack of color in his cheeks and the five o'clock shadow that'd been sitting on his face long enough to almost turn into whiskers. Here's the problem with being so pissed at somebody you're only 99% sure you want to call it quits with: you can't help worrying when you realize they've lost way too much weight. Leah called him overweight, but to me he looked like half of him was missing.

There was a long pause before he set his cup down. I had the feeling it was his brain trying to catch up with the sudden appearance of a Nathan in his office at eight in the morning rather than procrastination. There's just only so terrible somebody can look before you have to assume it's affecting how they think, too.

"I don't know," he finally whispered. He sounded like he might be getting over a cold. Or maybe he'd spent most of his night bawling. "If it was up to just me I'd give you both right now. But I have to answer to other people." He rubbed a hand over his face. "I'll find a way to make the job work and see if I can convince them on the rest. That's the absolute least of what I owe you."

I thought about saying something nasty back--Dale's the manager, after all, park financials are his job--but didn't. I need the job. Instead I told him I appreciated it.

“But,” I told him, “if you tell me you need me riding that coach again, contract or no contract, I'm going to tell you exactly where you can stick it, Dale.”

“Would it make you feel better if you did?”

I think I sort of blinked at him. It's been so long I barely remember the nooks and crannies of his sense of humor anymore. “I don't know. Maybe?”

“Then I'm going to need you to drive the coach.”

“Dale, you can take that stagecoach, and you can—”

I was halfway through saying it when I caught the look on his face. I really did forget that morbid streak adjacent to his funnybone. I started chuckling, and then he started, and thirty seconds later I was in the chair in front of his desk bent over laughing with tears in my eyes. It wasn't even funny, really, but there's a real learning curve to becoming human again. Last week I was crying over a Jeopardy commercial. And unlike the commercial, this had the one-two punch of being like—

—well, you know. Before.

He finally pushed his coffee across the desk at me. He probably meant for me to take a sip and calm down, but instead I just stopped laughing and pushed it back. It was already half gone, probably safe to drink, but still. Still. Dale looked down at the desk and cleared his throat.

“No,” he said, finally. “I don't need you on the coach. Or want you there. Mitchell took it over—voluntarily, don't look at me like that, Nate. It's not more dangerous than any of the other pretenders now. Not since . . . let's say, its former owner left the premises. He . . . he can get off again. When it's time to go home.” Dale took a deep breath and tapped the top of his desk like he was closing a conversational door. “I'll tell you what you could do, for a start. You know Twin Vale probably better than anyone else on the grounds. You could show Madeleine around while I . . . get things moving. She's going to be taking point. As the above-ground leader. I was able to get her approved since the contract was breached. It's not perfect, but it's better.”

"Where do I find her?"

"She's assigned to Candyland, but until the park opens she's mostly been staying in Hollywood. She likes the piano."

I just nodded at him and got up, and thanked him again. Not cruel, but cool--a business deal. I saw him pull something out of his desk as I left the office--a notebook or a ledger, I couldn't tell which and didn't much care. I just headed straight ahead to Hollywood.

If the morning had ended there, I wouldn't be here now, telling you about it. But it didn't—I introduced myself to Madeleine and walked her around Twin Vale, and stood near the breakroom and tried not to shake while she greeted the horses and climbed on the stagecoach next to Mitchell. He waved at me and called over that he'd be taking another three circuits--about an hour's time--and suggested that afterward we could get lunch.

I was just fine with that idea, because I didn't like seeing him up there, and also it meant I could do something I hadn't done since I'd left the hospital: visit with Leah. I was pretty sure she'd be hanging out with her pretender, and since I had no problem with Mr. Scratch--had only just barely met him once, in fact, and that was when Joshua was still his handler--I thought I'd much rather spend the hour chatting with a friend than hanging around Twin Vale giving myself the creeps.

So I stopped in horror, where I spotted Leah sitting by the haunted hospital with Mr. Scratch rolling around at her feet. Just a girl and her monster-dog . . . except for the way she was staring. Sort of off and into the distance, like a painting, but with this weird little smile on her lips, almost like a little kid in a school photo who has no idea yet what it means to look at the camera. I had to call her name twice to get her attention, and when I finally did she didn't seem at all surprised to see me. She just bounced to her feet and headed my way, still just a little bit . . . off, somehow.

“I knew you'd be back,” she told me, and then I realized where that sense of offness was coming from: even though the park isn't open yet, she was in costume.

And then she said something else, something I could never imagine my empathetic friend from the stagecoach saying. That something else is why I'm here on this forum right now. Let me tell you, I haven't felt this painfully self-aware of being ten years behind the times since Mitchell tried to show me how to use his tablet. But Leah is easily the best friend I've ever had, and I think she's in trouble, and that means I have to use whatever tools I can find to help her. You all know her better than I do, so this seems like a good place to start.

Does it sound like her, do you think, to look at the park, and smile, and say “there's something in it that just makes you never want to leave”?


	2. I'm Getting Human Again

Well, a new day, a new shitshow.

Dale called Mitchell last night and asked to talk to me. I used to wonder why he sounded so exhausted after “board meetings.” I guess now I know, huh? 

I said hi when Mitchell handed me the phone, and so did Dale, and then there was a long pause. Finally he broke it.

"I talked to them."

"Okay." 

He let out a sigh. I had the feeling he'd been drinking. "You have a job. You don't have back pay."

"That's it?"

"I argued for almost an hour, Nate--Nathan. Base pay times ten years at normal hours, no pay raises or bonuses or anything, is about five hundred thousand dollars. When they said no I argued all the way down to one-fifth and they still wouldn't go for it." He paused. When he spoke again he sounded ashamed. "I had to give up. I . . . don't guess Leah's told you anything, about the park workings, has she?"

"She kept a blog I found and read. There's nothing she knows that I don't, I don't think."

"Then you'll understand . . . I hope. When I say I wanted to keep my eyeballs."

"Jesus Christ." 

"Jesus Christ had nothing to do with it." He paused. "I think I can still make a case on the basis of labor laws. Strictly speaking, you _were_ working all that time. Upper management isn't totally bound by human laws, but you signed a contract with the park, them refusing to let me uphold the park's end of it is the kind of thing that might really grind their gears if it's pointed out." He paused again. "But not today."

"No. Shit. Dale, I'm sorry."

"You asked for what's owed to you. You don't have to apologize for that." There was another pause, and then I heard a heavy glass clink before he came back on the line. "I did get the okay on rehiring you without one or both of us getting our guts rearranged. They demanded the right to assign you. I told them I wasn't putting you back on the coach, and they weren't too happy about it, but they accepted."

Then he told me what my new assignment was. I wasn't too happy about it, either. But I didn't have a whole lot of options.

So today I turned up at the park again with a mix of Mitchell's hand-me-downs and some of Target's finest, to see if I passed muster with a company spokesperson. And by company spokesperson, I mean Madeleine. It's probably totally not cool for me to say this about somebody who, strictly speaking, is going to be my boss, but she's adorable. Somebody picked her up a more weather-appropriate dress and a pair of shoes and a jacket, and also painted her nails. She was incredibly excited to have somebody to show them to, hot pink against light brown, until she remembered why I was there and tried to stand up straighter and act like she was, one thousand percent and absolutely, an adult. Which was honestly even cuter.

Dale, on the other hand, had a trio of angry red lines running down his cheek. It almost looked like he'd gotten clawed by a cat. If, that is, a cat had paws the size of human hands, and also if Dale wasn't allergic to cats.

I think I already said feelings are bullshit, but they're even more bullshit when you want to be pissed at someone and also can't help wanting to kiss it better.

Madeleine thought I was delightful. Dale gave me this sort of noncommittal noise, like he didn't want to actually comment on my appearance in case I took it the wrong way. At least, that's what he did until I turned to leave, and then I heard this kind of _squeak!_ I haven't heard, hell. Probably since we first started dating. I turned back and raised my eyebrows. He was making the kind of face that said he didn't want to say anything because he'd start laughing.

“Want to share the joke?”

“Nate, where'd you get those jeans?”

I looked down at them to make sure I didn't grab a pair with a ripped-out crotch or something, but they looked fine. Almost new. “Mitchell's place?”

“Might want to get a different pair before the first.”

“Because . . . ?”

I knew there was no way he was going to keep a straight face, but I didn't expect him to just whip out his phone and take a picture of my ass.

“Hey!”

He held out the phone before he put his head down on his desk and laughed. I took the phone and looked at the pockets, and so basically tonight my legs hurt like you wouldn't believe from chasing Mitchell all the way across the park for giving me his girlfriend's old jeans and Dale has a picture of my butt covered in white and purple rhinestones.

He told me he's saving it for blackmail material, the asshole.

With me heading back into Twin Vale to take Warin's place as an actual actor, the number of actors and pretenders has remained the same but fallen totally out of balance. I'm an actor who's not minding a pretender, and Madeleine is joining Candyland as a pretender without an actor. That puts three of us in Twin Vale and five of us in Candyland, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a vaguely uneasy feeling about it. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just the idea of things being out of whack after so long. Everything else in the park is set on such a neat axis.

Speaking of new, Leah wasn't at work today, even though she pretty much never misses. I guess she and Anne and Maxine went out for lunch since the park reopens in less than two weeks. It was a relief, hearing that. Seeing her sitting on that wall with Monster Mutt yesterday was totally unnerving.

I did text her my new number, since Dale got me a phone as part of my new contract--a nice one, too. It took about half an hour before I heard back, but when I did it was by phone call, with a very loud background, and Leah doing that thing where you laugh so hard you sound drunk even when you're not.

"Nathan! Nathan, I have a question. Na--eek!"

I heard a voice in the background--either Anne or Maxine, I had no idea which--yelling "don't listen to her, she's being a nerd" into the phone. There was a large amount of giggling and then Leah got control of the phone again.

"Nathan. In Lord of the Rings. The movies. Who made the Silmarils?"

"Uh--"

There's something about being asked a question _that obscure_ with zero warning that just kind of shuts your entire brain down, even when you could rattle off the answer in your sleep.

"Come on, I have ten dollars on this, you have to help me." 

"I--sorry. Um, Fëanor made the Silmarils. They're carried by different people, though, I think the only one that's mentioned in the movies is the Light of Earendil--"

"Yeah, but who _made_ them in the movies."

"I don't think they ever said in the movies. It'd still be Fëanor though, the movies didn't change _that_ much."

Leah's voice suddenly came from further in the background, but it was raised in such a triumphant shout I couldn't have missed a word if I'd tried. " _Yes!_ I _told_ you, the answer's not in the movies!" She came back close to the line. "Thanks, Nathan, I--" There was a high-pitched squeak, probably her being tackled by someone--"I owe you one. Love you!" And she hung up.

I have no idea how she knew I used to be into Lord of the Rings, but I was so stunned by anybody but Dale ending a phone call to me with “I love you” I don't think I could've asked her if I'd tried. Maybe Dale unearthed some Halloween pictures from the year I dragged him with me as Frodo and Sam. It's been ten years and people are still bitching about black hobbits being unrealistic, but Dale has that Sean Astin look down pat, and with the two of us together (complete with furry slippers) you couldn't mistake us for any other literary pair if you tried. I'll have to ask Leah where she found out the next time I see her. Come to that, I wouldn't mind seeing the photos again, either, if Dale still has them.

I haven't mentioned that weird feeling about Leah to anyone else yet. We've been working together for up to five years, some of us, but nobody here has ever really gotten to know me, except her. I'm not sure they'd take me seriously if I brought it up. Not yet, anyway.

I have to go pick up jeans and a pair of boots tomorrow to break in before the season starts, so I'm going to see if I can get her to go with me. I have this feeling the more time she spends out of the park, the better. I'll keep you guys posted if anything new comes up.


	3. I'm The Watchman

Well, today was . . . interesting.

Leah picked me up this morning and immediately handed me a ziploc bag. Apparently I make pretty funny faces when I'm shocked, because she started giggling.

“You found milk and cereal bars!”

She shook her head. “I think they've been discontinued everywhere, but I found a couple of copycat recipes online. They're . . . okay, I guess. I think it's one of the weirdest things I've ever eaten.”

“Says the freak who drinks raspberry Mountain Dew.”

I managed to eat three of the bars on the way to the mall. They're not the same as the ones I used to grab on the way out the door—I think it's mostly the telltale flavor of preservatives that's missing—but close enough. Of course, I've also discovered that when you haven't eaten in four or five years, everything tastes different. I ate a banana the other day and I swear they weren't sweet the last time I had one.

Also, if you think there's something stupid about accepting unwrapped food from someone in the park, I know what you're thinking. I'd know that smell anywhere these days. And I could be wrong, but I think Leah and Dale are probably the two people I need to worry about least—Leah because she's been through the same thing, Dale because, well. I don't think he's in a hurry for a reprise. And also, at some point in the last ten years he turned into the kind of person who keeps a bottle of hard liquor in the bottom drawer of his desk and dresses like a hobo. Dale is smart, but he's always been the very straightforward kind of smart. Thinking in circles isn't really his thing. I'm guessing it's even less his thing now.

I'll give him this, it seems like he wants to make things right. Yesterday he basically forced me to take five hundred dollars and a credit card, on the basis that I'd had very little stuff before landing on the stagecoach and pretty much none now, and if he couldn't give me back pay he at least wanted me to be able to take care of myself. I tried to argue with him about it until he told me I could consider it a gift or consider it a paycheck advance but either way I was taking it. Dale is the kind of person who gives in so often to others, it's easier to just accept it when he gets his heart set on something.

He also told me if I didn't use the card, he was going to do it for me and I was going to have to hope he got my size right. 

Given that Dale hasn't been even remotely close to my size since he was sixteen or so, I decided it'd probably be best if I just used the damn card.

Leah was thrilled. I've never been big on shopping, and I don't think she is, either, but I can't lie, there was something exciting about the idea of being able to go to actually-the-mall instead of a secondhand place, and get what I actually needed instead of the closest thing to it, and not have to sit there counting pennies.

I might've gone a little overboard.

And by "might," I mean "did."

Which is how I ended up with six bags of clothes, a couple of new books, and a pair of glasses. Leah dragged me to one of those walk-in places after she saw me at Burger King, in her words, “squinting at the menu like you're trying to be a film noir detective.”

Two hours later, I walked out with a pair of those quickie frames and an immediate decision to get contacts. I don't seem to have picked up any facial lines or anything during my time on the stagecoach, but apparently driving around from dawn to dusk every day for ten years is hell on your vision.

We ended up back at Leah's, going through clothes to cut off tags and watching Skyfall. I almost dropped my Pepsi toward the end. Leah didn't get why Bond saying he had a gay fling was such a big deal. That's good, I guess. At least not everything has gone to hell while I was away. Apparently there's a prequel trilogy to LOTR now, too. I'm not going to run out of movies anytime soon.

She made me try everything on again, too. At first I thought she was doing some weird girl thing and then I realized no, actually, once the tags are off everything feels different. Maybe the girls who do that are onto something.

You might be wondering why any of this was interesting. And honestly, that part isn't. It's just . . . you have to understand how completely, totally, boringly _normal_ the morning was to understand all the weirdness of the rest.

I noticed a weird smell in Leah's apartment as soon as I stepped in, but I didn't want to say anything. That's just rude, you know? I kind of wondered if maybe there was a problem with the pipes in the building, but when she opened the fridge to offer me a pop the smell got stronger and I knew exactly what it was: she'd had vegetables in the fridge so long they'd gone rotten.

There was dust on the TV remote, too, when I went to turn up the volume. And when I went to the bathroom, the tub had that weird bone-dry look you see in houses that've been empty for awhile, like it's not just dry but dehydrated.

All of that is weird enough, but it gets weirder.

_Leah didn't seem to notice any of this._

If it was someone else, I'd say they were a slob. But Leah's always looked neat and clean. When she brought me clean clothes, they smelled fresh. Hell, when I saw her after she fell off the stagecoach she had bandages so expertly done they could've come off a movie set. Nothing I know about her lines up with a grody apartment.

She kept squirming through the movie, too, and a couple of times I saw her reach under her shirt to scratch her back. I'm not entirely sure why that bothers me so much. Some people have dry skin, sometimes your body just decides it wants to be an asshole for a little while, there's nothing weird about having an itch. But something about this was. I don't know how to explain it to you. Dale would call it my spidey sense, and I guess that's as good a word as any.

Leah asked if I wanted to stay over, and since I don't want to be that person who stays for “a couple of days” six weeks long, I took her up on it and gave Mitchell a call. Leah's got an actual air mattress instead of a couch, too, which is great. Don't get me wrong--Mitchell letting me stay kept me off the street, and without him that first couple of weeks I probably would've landed in the crazyhouse. But even short people can't stretch on a sofa, and until I was on the air mattress I had no idea how much I missed that luxury.

It's night now. I'm still worried about Leah. We ordered pizza for dinner, and she ate—while laughing at me because I'm now in several-years-delayed mourning at the death of the twisted crust pizza—but she seemed not entirely there, somehow, and afterward I was the one who moved the leftovers into the fridge because it seemed like she forgot all about them.

I ended up calling Dale after she went to bed. Call me stupid, but I wanted to hear his voice. And to see if he could offer up an explanation for Leah's behavior.

I caught him just before he left the park. Apparently with only a few days to go before reopening day the Ferris wheel threw a linchpin during safety testing, so after he and Gary—Gary's the head of maintenance, and I'm pretty sure I actually remember him from before the stagecoach, although he was new back then—found the pin and found out it was rusted through they had to replace it, and then do a manual check of every single nut and bolt and pin on the whole damned thing, and then Dale had to do paperwork for the health and safety people. And you know the worst part of the whole thing? In the end they had to replace one linchpin, one bolt, and a lightbulb. Nine hours' work for three pieces I could hold in my hand all at the same time, and if the work wasn't done properly it could kill people. 

Even when you take the eldritch abominations out of the question, I am _so_ glad I don't do Dale's job.

Since he was still there, I asked if he could check on something for me. He wasn't happy about it—and I don't blame him, I wouldn't be either—but he went.

After the whole thing with Warin, the window to the “out of order” bathroom was screwed shut. I wanted to know if the screws were still there. Dale said they were, and then I heard this awful rusty clunk, and then he came back to the phone line.

“Window's sealed, the back stall is sealed, the door's locked and I had the key changed. There's no way she got in there again.”

“Do you happen to know if—” and this is the part that pisses me off, the part I'm finding it so hard to forgive, not the changing but the leaving—“did anyone ever tell you if I was this spacey when I first got on the coach?”

There was this big long pause. I'm pretty sure he was trying to stop himself from crying. “No. Nobody did.” There was another pause, but this one was shorter. “And Leah isn't, normally, either.”

We didn't talk for long after that. I told him I should let him get on the road. He told me I'll never believe how many devices use Bluetooth these days, but he let me go anyway.

So now I'm sitting here filling you all in. I don't know what's wrong with Leah, but it's getting more and more obvious the Wild Ones aren't done with her. I'm not sure how, or why.

But I know I have to put a stop to it.


	4. I'm A Hot Mess

Well, it couldn't be avoided forever.  
  
  
I went into the park today to help Mitchell with the stagecoach, because apparently the horses weren't taking so well to someone new. I expected it to be a mystery that'd take hours to solve—if I could solve it—but actually, it's just that Mitchell is left-handed and kept trying to get up on the wrong side of the box seat.  
  
  
It's funny, sometimes, the things that drive the pretenders nuts.  
  
  
Anyway, I still don't have a car, and I came in with Leah, so that left me to bum around the park and try to get reacquainted with parts I haven't seen in what feels like a thousand years. The horror section is almost completely tested and ready to go for next week, so I decided to see if Darius was in and if, possibly, I could sweet-talk him into turning on one of the dark rides so I could have a turn. There are three of them--the Whacky Shack, the Terror Tunnel, and Spook Smashers--and while Spook Smashers sounds like, and is, a complete Ghostbusters ripoff, it's also a lot of fun. Most darkrides just take you through an effects tunnel, but Spook Smashers actually has "ghost guns" in it and you can attack the spooks back and earn points, if you have an arcade card.  
  
  
Darius was not in.  
  
  
Dale was, though, and it was my luck he was, in fact, doing a test run on Spook Smashers. So much for that, I thought, and I thought I'd go catch Leah instead, but Dale saw me and waved me over. I didn't really want to go—for a whole host of reasons I'm sure are obvious—but he's currently my boss, so I went. He shut down the switchboard outside the ride and raised his eyebrows at me.  
  
  
“Glasses?”  
  
  
“Hate them already. I'm getting contacts. I thought all the safety testing over here was done?”  
  
  
“Mostly. Haunted Hospital's the last one. I'm just re-timing strobes right now. Can we talk?”  
  
  
“I guess.”  
  
  
Dale suggested we eat in Hollywood. The restaurants are still all shut down, but the Hollywood breakroom has one of those vending machines in it that has sandwiches and stuff, and they're decent, for insta-food. It sounded as good as anything else to me, so we picked up lunch in the breakroom and headed for the pianist's restaurant to eat.  
  
  
I really didn't want to hear Dale beg. Or even try to lay out a case for getting a second chance. He didn't, though.  
  
  
What actually happened might have been worse, in a way where sometimes you just don't want the better option.  
  
  
Dale sat down, took a sip of his Coke, and then gave me the I-don't-want-to-be-doing-this-either look. He started with “listen,” and I was ready to cut him off before he held up a hand.  
  
  
“I already know how you feel. And why. I'm not going to try to tell you to hurry up and sift through a decade's worth of issues in two weeks. But the only way you being here works—from the human side, that is—is if you and I can actually work together. I'm reasonably sure nobody else on the crew would accuse me of playing favorites, but nobody's going to want to tiptoe around dynamite. Once those gates open, if there's bad blood between any of us, the guests will know, too, and I don't want that. If I have to run this hellhole I might as well make it worth it for the people who show up.”  
  
  
I haven't cried about what fell out between us for probably seven or eight years, but I almost did then. At some point when I wasn't around my sweet, daydreamy boy turned into a sad-eyed pragmatist with the first few strands of gray creeping too early into his hair.  
  
  
I really hope when Leah took Warin out she made him suffer, the son of a bitch.  
  
  
Finally I just nodded, and did my best to smile like he hadn't just killed me with a few short sentences. “I can work with that. Thank you.”

He gave me the same smile back. Between the two of us, I'm pretty sure we should be nominated for an Oscar. “How's Leah?”

“I don't know. I really don't.” I ran back over the same weird stuff I told him about last night before adding another three to the pile: a sad, wilted plant I noticed in the window, a weirdly empty spice rack on the counter, and—equal parts amusing and alarming—a very specific look, aimed at me, from one of her elderly neighbors. I finished up with that uneasy feeling I shared with you all yesterday—just something wrong, something I couldn't name or define but knew as clearly as I know my own name. Dale frowned when I finished up.

“Nothing in the rebuilt contract should affect her this way,” he finally told me. “I know she made a deal with . . . certain parties I won't name—and I'd prefer you don't, either—to get you back. I wouldn't be surprised if he turned that deal around on her. But if he's gone, the effect of that deal should be null. I trust your judgment. But what you're telling me doesn't add up with what I know, which means either I don't know everything or you've got something wrong. My money's on 'I don't know everything.' He's tricky as hell."

“Is he actually gone?”

Dale sighed and took three whole bites of his instant soup before he answered me. I got the feeling he was trying to word things, not stall. One thing I've picked up pretty quickly, wording things exactly right to minimize harm might be the most important part of Dale's job. “I'll tell you the truth, Nate, I don't know. I didn't exactly _break_ the contract when I fired Leah, and he didn't exactly break it when he tried to turn her, either, but both of us stretched it to its absolute limits to the point that it might as well have been broken, and functionally it was considered so until it was renegotiated. As far as I can gather, that made us both equally culpable. I can't imagine he got much forgiveness below for breaking the contract, especially since he went directly against the wishes of the group. At the same time, after he disappeared, Leah and I both noticed the window into the central bathroom open. I also can't imagine he'd go back if he didn't think his survival was reasonably assured. I wish I had a better answer for you.”

Lunch was pretty quiet for awhile after that. When we started talking again, it was the kind of meaningless bullshit you talk when you have nothing else to say. Leah's on both of our minds, I'm sure of that. I thought about asking Dale for a meeting with the other actors to see what we can come up with, but that runs me into another problem: Leah would have to be present at any such meeting, and I don't think she knows what's happening to her. Or maybe it's better to say I don't think she knows anything is happening, period. I'm the only test case we've got for someone reversing course after starting a transformation, and what happened to me doesn't match up with what's happening to her at all. I didn't know why I suddenly didn't need to sleep and couldn't leave the park, but I knew it was happening, and I was aware for the whole thing. Leah's still coming and going freely and acting like nothing's changed, but she's having weird lapses in memory and attention.

I think maybe the best thing I can do at this point is to tackle the rest of the actors one or two at a time. They still might not be ready to believe me by myself as that guy they've all worked with but never properly met, but I've got Dale to back me up now on her weird behavior. And with opening day drawing ever closer, I should probably take the chance to at least say hello to them all anyway.

I just hope we can pin down the problem before it gets worse.


	5. I'm Making Friends

Progress!

. . . kind of.

First, I should tell you all I did the stupidest thing in the park today that I've done since I accepted a certain Coke. And it was totally worth it.

I reread Leah's account of the last few months last night to get an idea who I should start with today, but before I could make a decision myself I literally—and I do mean literally—ran into Anne at the entrance. Hard enough I almost knocked her over, actually. I didn't, but this is what I get for rediscovering Angry Birds. Anne caught her balance pretty quickly, though, and then gave me this huge, dazzling smile. If she was a different body type, I'd think she was a cheerleader in high school, but she's like Dale that way--she's always going to be kind of plump, and people are always going to judge her for it, and they're always going to miss out.

“Hi! So we finally actually meet,” she said, and stuck out her hand to shake. “Dale said you're still going to be in Twin Vale. Are you, um . . . okay? With, you know, everything?”

She's the first person to ask me that, even awkwardly, and it actually made me smile. “Not totally, but I'm taking it as an excuse to basically dance on that asshole's grave, and that's helping a lot.”

She gave me that giant smile again and laughed a little, and when she said she had to head into Candyland I asked to go with her. She shared a little with me about opening procedures, since I'd never actually been part of them before, and told me a little about staff I haven't met yet but will once non-actor crew start coming back in more regularly. I think she ended up laughing at me when we walked into Candyland and I went running straight to the carousel. 

That might sound weird, going straight for the merry-go-round like a kindergartener, but you've probably never been on a carousel like the one in this park. It's the original one from the 1800s that first turned on its lights here when the park was a fairground. You can still see where the brass rings were and everything. Only a few of the animals have been replaced in all that time, and the ones that have been are carved from wood just like the originals. You can tell which ones are new because they tend to have steel poles instead of wood, but they have the same style of paint job, the same glass gems, everything. It's absolutely gorgeous. Sometimes in the off-season people will rent out one of the restaurants or part of the park to host events, and I've seen a lot of bridal portraits taken on the carousel.

I honestly thought I'd never see it again. I used to sneak on after my shift was over and ride it when the end-of-night music was playing. I couldn't imagine Dale getting rid of it, not after over a hundred years, but it was great to see it was still there. 

At least until the fucking mime dropped in front of me, that is.

I did tell you guys I did something stupid.

If you're wondering if the stupid thing might have been provoking the mime . . . yeah, it was.

Not much, but I did call him a motherfucker and ask if he missed his boyfriend. He hissed at me and tried to grab my shoulders. I ducked and swatted one of his hands away and told him I bite when I'm provoked, and that's about when Anne came running up, wailing apologies and dragging him away.

“He was fine, and then he saw you and just . . . lost it,” she told me a few minutes later, after she'd pulled him off to his cage. “I don't think he really cares about . . . you know who, but he can tell you, you know . . . ” She sort of blushed and looked down. That's going to be a problem, I think. Nobody here except Leah is willing to just take “you were stuck as a freak of nature for a decade, but you're not now” as a basic fact of life. Water is wet, the sky is up, I used to be a pretender. Anne and Dale are trying, but the others seem to sort of be keeping their distance.

“I wasn't human for awhile.”

“Yeah, that.”

I suggested maybe this wasn't the best place for me to be for an afternoon, if Anne wanted to let the mime run free for a couple more days, and she walked me back toward the front of the park. I almost forgot why I'd gone looking for her in the first place, but she stopped me just outside the office with a look like she'd been pulling together her courage for the last hour or so.

“Hey, Nathan?” she asked me. “Have you talked to Leah lately? Other than when she called you the other day?”

“Yeah, I'm staying with her right now.” I had the feeling she was going to ask a specific question. I wasn't wrong.

“Has she seemed . . . not totally there? To you?”

She didn't have to ask me twice, of course. I spilled everything about the apartment to her, and about seeing Leah sitting in the horror section like some kind of creepy doll. Anne's shoulders dropped like she was going to cry, but in that way where someone finally believes you.

And then Anne shared her half, and I hated hearing it because I don't want to see Leah literally fade in front of me, but I was glad to know it's not just me.

Apparently, the lunch I saw her go to was the first time since the deal that anyone from the park had been able to get her to go anywhere. Anne and Maxine both noticed she seemed distracted; “hectic” was the word Maxine used, while Anne went with “desperate.” Both agreed she didn't seem to realize how she was coming across, and when Maxine suggested they should see if I'd check in on Mr. Scratch for a couple of days so they could take a pre-season long weekend, Leah got agitated and upset. By the time Anne finished, she was almost in tears.

So I asked if any of the others might know more.

And that's how we ended up in an almost-all-the-actors staff meeting after all. A couple of people weren't in today, but pretty much everyone who was agreed: either they didn't see Leah often enough to know if she was being weird or not, or she's gotten very weird.

And then they all looked at me. It's funny how sometimes you can tell exactly what people are thinking. So I just said it.

“We didn't go through the process the same way. But she's turning into a pretender, and if we want to stop it, I don't think we have very long.”

“So how do we do it?” I was kind of surprised to hear the question from Oliver first. I got the impression he and Leah didn't really talk. It doesn't surprise me the others would want to help her, though. Leah is the kind of person you can't help liking. It's nerve-wracking being the only person here with any kind of experience this way, though. I know barely anything and I still know more than anyone else.

Except . . .

“I think finding out how it works is our first step. And that's going to mean tackling Dale.”

“He'll talk to you before any of us,” was Darius' opinion, and he's probably not wrong, but personal opinion here, being friendly with Dale and shelving the relationship question until later means not trading on any hopes he's got.

“If we go as a group he's more likely to cave.” Or would have been ten years ago, at least. We agreed to see if we can't ambush him tomorrow, as a group, and maybe—possibly—get some answers.

I'm just hoping he has them.


	6. I'm A Gang Leader

Well, today didn't go . . . badly.

I kind of wonder a little bit what Dale thought when he walked in and saw six of us all piled outside his office. I was there, of course, but so were Anne and Maxine and Darius. I'm not sure if Oliver was interested in joining the press gang or if he got dragged by Mitchell, but by the time Dale got in the only two people missing were Caroline—not yet in for the day—and, of course, Leah herself, who'd gotten in with me and made a beeline straight for Mr. Scratch.

Dale's gotten a lot better at poker faces in the last ten years. Either that, or I'm completely out of practice at reading him. He just looked at us all and sighed.

“If this is a mass walkout, you all picked a hell of a time to do it.”

Dale threw me for enough of a loop I didn't have an immediate answer for him. It was Maxine who spoke up.

“This is a mass 'our friend is in trouble,' Dale.”

Dale looked at me. I'm pretty sure he was waiting for me to say psych, but of course I didn't, and finally he just shook his head and motioned us all toward the front. There's not enough space in his office for seven people. Strictly speaking, there's not enough space in his office for two people, sometimes. The willow is just inside park grounds, and there are benches underneath it--not enough for seven people to sit down, but enough for most of us to have a spot, if we pulled them around to face each other.

“Okay,” he said, once we were all settled. “Shoot.”

“Let's start here.” I should probably tell you all Leah and Warin gave you a very biased picture of me. Leah saw me during her telling only as someone in desperate need of help, and to Warin, of course, I was a plaything. I'm not as much of a hardass as some people, but I'm not a pushover, either. “Is it true you were going to trade Leah for me, when you were negotiating with someone we're not mentioning?”

. . . actually, sometimes I'm just a bastard.

I thought he might try to say no, especially in the face of five other people going into a minor uproar, but he just put his head down and ran his fingers into his hair. “I thought about it. I wasn't a fan of the idea. But I wasn't a fan of leaving you when I had the opportunity to save you, either. I didn't know what to do. She made a deal with him before I was put in a place to decide.” He gave me this kind of helpless look. I decided not to give him the slack.

“So you almost threw her under the bus. The way I see it, Dale, you owe her. She might've told you she was okay with it, but I don't forgive that easily. She tried to help you and you turned on her. So spill.”

Anne took over before I could ask anything. “How are pretenders made? That's really what we're here for. We can't stop it if we don't know how it starts.”

Dale gave me one last pleading look for an out, but honestly, after rereading Leah's story again, if he asked for another chance right now I'd say no. It's nice to think he finally got around to giving a shit, but not at someone else's expense. At last he shook his head.

“I've only seen it as an adult once. As a kid . . . I don't remember much. Laila was here one day and gone the next, and a couple of weeks later the nurse showed up on the grounds and scared the bejeezus out of me. Of course, she got turned mid-season, too. Wouldn't surprise me if the official story was she quit, and my parents just kept her out of sight until . . . everything was over. Nathan can tell you what happened to him, but I don't think he took the . . . I guess what you'd call the 'normal route.' Still mostly human after ten years? I think he was probably being kept right at the edge of turned on purpose."

“So once someone starts, you only have a couple of weeks?” Oliver was giving Dale this look like he couldn't believe Dale hadn't said anything before we all ambushed him. “What about Leah?”

Dale just kind of shook his head at all of us. “I know the more poison you drink, the faster the process. I think there's a certain amount of willpower involved--when you give up, it takes over. I don't know how much she took. I don't know if she's still sure it can be undone. And I don't know if the process can be reversed in the absence of . . . certain parties.”

“Just so we're clear, is there a reason we're not naming him?” Mitchell actually scared me when he spoke up. Or startled me, more like, I guess. I'd forgotten he was there, but I didn't need Dale to answer this one.

“Names have power. And it's not totally clear what happened to him. If he's gone, fuck him. If he's not . . . I'd rather not have his attention back here when we're trying to deal with this, you know?” I don't think anybody expected me to field that one, but you do pick up a few things, riding around Twin Vale all day with nothing to do but think. Mitchell kind of made this “fair enough” face and focused back on Dale.

“So what do we do?”

Dale shook his head and spread his hands. “Not a clue, Mitchell. I don't have a damned clue. This isn't related to my family's contract. I don't have any say in it. And I don't know how much more I can tell you. See if you can brainstorm something, if you want. Look for loopholes. Try to spend time with her while you can, just in case.”

“And if we find a way out,” Darius chimed in, “you'll help us save her?”

“If I'm able.”

“We're all going to hold you to that, you know,” Anne told him, and then everyone got up in such perfect unison it was like we'd rehearsed it. The other five had pretenders to check on, but that left me standing with Dale. I thought he might try to justify himself again, but he didn't. The hell of it is, I agree with Leah on this one: I understand why he thought it. I might have, too, if our positions were reversed. And he was panicking. But I don't think I could have seriously considered it, and that's where we differ. If the contract was that close to broken, there had to be a way to get me out without throwing her to the wolves.

Dale turned around to head to his office, and that's when I had the idea.

“Do you have a notebook?”

I thought he was going to ignore me, but he didn't. “Notebook?”

“Loose-leaf, if you've got one, but I'll settle for spiral.”

“I've got some legal pads.”

“Can I buy one from you?”

I never thought I'd see a grown man get that close to crying over a notebook, but it happened.

“Nate—”

“There's a reason I'm asking. That isn't because I'm pissed at you. And a pen. What's the going price for a pen and a legal pad? Fair exchange. You give your price, I decide if I want the pad that badly.”

I saw his eyebrows go up when I said fair exchange. And good—good. He got it. Maybe not all of it, but he knew why I put it that way. 

“Did you bring lunch?”

“Yeah. I finally convinced Leah to let me cook last night. Mostly so I could clear out her fridge, but I cooked.”

“Did you bring actual food, or a box lunch?”

I gave him one of those looks you give somebody when you know they already know the answer to whatever they've just asked you. "Does a bear shit in the woods, Dale?"

“I'll take whatever your side is.” And yes—it's been a decade and I'm pissed at him, and I'll probably be for awhile, but he still got exactly what I was going for, and I couldn't help giving him a smile anyway. Food is definitely the best option.

“Potato salad.”

“Oh, hell yes. I can't make yours for shit.”

I just kind of rolled my eyes at him. “It's 'cause white people think paprika's a four-letter word, and I never got you out of the habit. I left my lunch in the horror breakroom. I can bring it by when I swing through. Mind if I take the pad on a couple hours' advance?”

“Be my guest. The interest's going to cost you a fork.”

I wrote my notes on my way back to Leah, being careful to scribble down in the margins what information I was taking as payment on her behalf for Dale going behind her back. At some point soon I'm going to have to convince her he owed her something for it, but that's tomorrow's problem. Today's problem is ensuring that if anybody tries to say I can't use what few tools I have so far because they were stolen--I have a track record that they're not.

For now, I have a written record of the conversation. A few ideas written down, too.

Let's hope I'm on the right track.


	7. I'm a Cut-Rate Sherlock Holmes

I got a late start to the park today, but I think I've got more to report today than I've had so far. It's a pretty mixed bag, but I've got a direction to go now.

I asked Leah if I could borrow her car this morning if I made coffee on the stove, which she's apparently never had. I don't bother with it often—there's a reason we have electric coffeemakers—but perked coffee is absolutely great when I can be bothered to go to the trouble, and she agreed without even thinking twice. She was antsy about getting to the park, but as soon as I said I was planning to get in this afternoon she said she'd take the morning to do laundry and get some cleaning done.

I can't say her staying out of the park by choice made me cry any tears, either.

I threw some broth and veggies on the stove with a little chicken and made a beeline out. Stew is great for April chill, and it's good when you don't have time to cook, too.

I headed straight for the library as soon as I got out of the apartment, and went right to circulation. You can read all you want without a card, but I need a computer for this. The address on my ID hasn't actually been mine for a decade, but I'm pretty sure Dale isn't going to report me for mail fraud.

I spent an hour on the computer, and then way too much time in the “new age” section, trying to sort mostly-fact from “oh look, easy money mystical nonsense.” I ended up with three pages of notes: what to do, what not to do, and a deep and abiding hatred of legal pads. How Dale can work without being able to move pages at will is beyond me. This is the paper I started with, though, and I traded for it, so I'm going to have to keep it and make it work somehow.

Leah was pale when I got back to the apartment. She gave me this awful smile and told me she wasn't sure she could go in. I was ready to throw her in the car and burn rubber all the way to the hospital, but she shook her head.

“I tried that soup you made,” she said. “I think I'm probably allergic to something that's in it. It burned all the way down. That isn't your fault, though, I didn't even know I had food allergies. I'll be okay. I'm not having hives or trouble breathing or anything. I just need a nap.”

I checked through the bag of spices I'd picked up as I was packing up the soup, and nearly kicked myself for not thinking it through. I already know there's a problem. I didn't need to make it worse.

Bay leaves, salt, fennel, I'm surprised I didn't kill her.

Although her _not_ dying on contact is a good thing for a whole bunch of reasons.

I got in around three and headed straight for Dale. He was actually in his office this time, feet up on the corner of the desk, on the phone and making faces that suggested he'd rather be out doing something simpler, like training killer bees.

"Yes. I--I know, Dad. Yes. Yes. I know. I know." He held the phone over his head and shook it before putting it back against his ear. "I know. Yes. I--no, she's still here. I--yes. _I know._ "

I decided to sit down. When Rick gets on a roll--one way more annoying than that one video, by the way, and it can't possibly have been so long you don't know which one I mean--a casual phone conversation can turn into _War and Peace._ Which, by the way, if you're wondering how Dale never noticed me coming in, you've never seen anybody on the phone with Rick. It involves a lot of closed eyes and staring at the corners of the room and wishing for death.

"Yes. No. No, I'm not--I _know,_ Dad. No. She's not. No. Not that I know of? Yes. Yes he is. I--yes, I know. Yes. No." A long pause. "No we're not. No. I talked to--yes, I know." He covered the receiver and sighed before taking his hand away. "Yes."

I waited until he hung up and threw his head back with the most pitiful groan you can imagine. Think like bear cub caught in a trap here. I dropped the soup on the desk in front of him before the groan could turn into a whine. I've seen him do it before. It's kind of cute, but I don't really have the time for it right now.

“Five minutes of your time.”

Dale jumped so hard I was afraid for a minute he might actually land on the floor. Instead he banged his hand on his chair and cussed.

“Jesus!”

“I can see where the confusion comes from, but nah, I'm not him. I would _strongly_ recommend not spilling this.” I tapped the soup.

Dale looked down at the container, then back at me. “What are you up to now?”

“More questions. Five minutes. What the _hell_ is on your hand?” It looked like he might've stabbed himself with a pen. No wonder he swore when he hit it.

“Warning shot.” He gave me this kind of we-know-this-get-on-with-it look. “You were saying?”

“ . . . maybe this is a bad time.” I wondered how he managed to clean and bandage his hand alone. And what he'd done with the pen.

“Tell you what. You bought five minutes. Ask your questions, I'll tell you if I can answer.”

I turned it over in my head for a minute and thought about it. “Okay.”

Dale nodded me to the chair in front of his desk and put the soup on the shelf behind him. “Shoot.”

“I told you I found Leah's blog about this place. The diva and the pianist . . . they were your relatives?”

“Yeah. My granddad's sister and her husband. Robert actually took our last name, I think, instead of the other way around.”

“How long have they been here? As pretenders?”

Dale looked off into a corner of the ceiling. It's funny, when you know someone well enough, you can read every tic and expression. You lose some of them after awhile, but not all. Not the most important ones, like _can you believe this_ and also _I can't count backward for shit._

“Since the fifties, I think.”

“And the nurse, Laila, when you were a kid?”

“Yeah.”

Something about that timeline bugged me, but I bought five minutes, and even though I'm pretty sure Dale wouldn't be counting the seconds . . . it's important. I pulled off my glasses and closed my eyes, hard. I thought of it last night in a dream and didn't write it down when I woke up, like an idiot.

“ _The hospital._ Dale, when did St. Macabre's go in? The haunted house?”

Dale just gave me this quizzical look. “In the horror section?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. Then he stopped, and spun his chair around, and went picking through the file cabinet. More fun stuff you learn as the manager's boyfriend: every single attraction in the park has its own file in there. Safety inspections, maintenance notes, original blueprints, the works. Some of the older ones are almost as thick as a phone book, and about as interesting. Finally he pulled out one of the thinner folders and opened it, flicking through the papers before he stopped in surprise.

“I'll be damned. It didn't go in until 2002. Then what was there before?” He went picking through the cabinet again. I looked at the clock on my phone. What was in the horror section before the haunted hospital was an interesting question—but one for after my time was up.

“So it went in after Laila became the nurse?”

Dale stopped his rifling and turned to look at me so slowly I swear I could hear him creaking as he did, like a windup toy.

“A season later. Son of a bitch.”

“Do you approve all the new attractions? Or I mean . . . you, your family, the humans in charge of the park.”

Dale looked troubled. “I think I'd better talk to my dad about his time here before I answer that for sure, Nate. I have, when things have gone in while I've been in the chair. But the situation itself's changed, hasn't it?”

“Something like that.” I checked my phone again. “I'm about out of time. I have to make this quick and that means I have to ask you not to get all defensive and shit."

Dale looked wary. "Okay."

"Nothing Leah ever said in her blog suggests you two were a thing. But is there any reason certain people might have thought you were a thing? Or could become a thing?"

Dale looked startled. "You mean a couple?"

"Yeah."

There was a pause--Dale seriously thinking about it, and me feeling the seconds tick by. At last he shrugged.

"The only thing I can think of is me inviting her over to the apartment. Other than my family once or twice she's the only person who's been in it since . . . you know. Or--maybe me trying to get her out of here when upper management decided they wanted her dead, instead of just turning her over." He looked down at the desk and toyed with the phone base. I didn't have time to wait for him to feel better--or patience, frankly.

“According to Leah's blog, Mr. Scratch and the stagecoach both belonged to your family. The diva and the pianist are direct relations. Laila specifically pissed someone off and got punished. A certain somebody decided to request Leah and me. I can definitely say I was never involved in any supernatural makeout sessions, so okay, he wanted Leah as a . . . a pet, or something, but where do I come into this pattern?”

“I wish like hell I knew what he wanted with Leah, Nate, but really, you have to ask where _you_ come in?” Dale raised his eyebrows. “Whoever or whatever the Wild Ones are, they don't pay too much attention to human marriage laws when they decide what constitutes family.”

“Great, I got more rights from a bunch of evil fairies than I did my own government.” Writing that down sounds like I'm one of those people who's always got the perfect one-liner, but if you'd actually been in the office, you probably would've been able to tell it was something I spit out from sheer shock and just got lucky it was halfway funny. Even if I wasn't currently on the feelings-go-round from hell, “I'm Nathan, Dale's husband” just sounds bizarre. I found out that's just kind of a thing now when I was in the hospital, but I guess I'm still playing catchup. I'd pay good money to see a sci-fi movie with cryogenics where the frozen people actually deal with culture shock when they wake up. “What a deal. You don't suppose Leah's secretly a descendant of somebody's bastard kid a few generations back, do you?”

“You know, I'm pretty sure you're joking, but let's renegotiate payment before we go hitting that wasp nest with a stick.” Dale looked at the phone. "That one I'd _really_ have to ask my dad about."

I left the office and went to check on Mr. Scratch. I figured Leah'd like an update, but he perked up when I got close to the cage and then put his head down with a whine as soon as he saw me. I tried giving him some scratches behind the ear anyway, but he wasn't having it. He picked his person, and I'm not her.

I wonder if she'll still be his person if she's not human anymore.


	8. I'm In Trouble, Maybe

Today was depressing.

Oliver agreed I could try my luck with the Aged Diva, and I met him outside the Pianist's restaurant this morning. I know he's kind of outside Leah's normal circle, but he's been pretty nice to me, and she got at least one good piece of information out of the Diva, so it seemed like it was worth the shot.

And if I'm being totally honest, it doesn't exactly hurt that Oliver's not too hard to look at, either.

I had the feeling we should start with Casablanca Nights, the Pianist's restaurant. It's where I used to work when I was in Hollywood, and it's a focal point for Hollywood, the kind you'd actually expect to go to some kind of giant ride or mainstage. It seemed like a good bet for the Diva--a classy space where she might reasonably expect to see people. And, of course, the Pianist.

Sure enough, she was inside, listening to him play, and suddenly I didn't want to disturb them. You get so little time to actually enjoy yourself when you're an unalive entity.

I was debating whether I should try anyway--a couple of questions probably wouldn't be enough to bother them that badly, or at least, I hoped not--and then I got my own little message from the Wild Ones. One a lot less violent than a pen through the hand, but maybe more frightening, as impossible as that sounds.

The Pianist and the Aged Diva both turned their heads, quick and sharp, and stared straight at me. It was like one of those movies with a doll that starts moving out of nowhere--that too-smooth, perfectly-synced creepfest. And then the Pianist started to play something different.

Every couple I've ever met with an “our song” has a cutesy story to go with it that sounds half-finished from the outside, and I guess Dale and I aren't any exception. You probably know ours. It's an instrumental, and the huge gag that turned it into “[our song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc3Cq89P97Y)” was us discovering the trailer music for The Two Towers--my favorite movie--actually originated in Requiem for a Dream--Dale's favorite movie. It's the biggest cinematic agreement we've ever had. That's the whole joke, if you're wondering. I told you these stories always sound half-finished from the outside.

I worked in Casablanca for about six months. I've heard probably everything the Pianist knows. Most of his songbook is old jazz standards and 1940s swing. You know, the kind of stuff you'd expect in a flashy, high-class Hollywood restaurant. And pretty consistent with Dale's guess on when he ended up stuck here. Sometimes he'll play stuff like Bobby Darin or Elvis, but still pretty old stuff, is what I'm saying.

Lux Aeterna is from 2000. Requiem For A Tower--the remixed version--is even newer. But the Pianist knocked it out in one shot, no hesitation or missed notes or sheet music or anything.

And then he and the Diva turned their heads back to a normal position and he launched straight into Night and Day like absolutely nothing at all had happened.

I apologized to Oliver and told him I thought I'd save the interview for another day, and got out of Hollywood as fast as I could go. I could be totally wrong, but it seems obvious to me: that was a threat, and I'm pretty sure it was aimed at Dale, not me. Either I need to be more careful what I'm asking him, or I need to tell him to slow the hell down and develop some kind of sense of self-preservation. I'm going to need his help, but that means needing him alive, and even at my most pissed I've never wanted him dead. Or permanently maimed, whatever the Wild Ones might decide.

Since Hollywood was off the table, I decided to head to the horror section, instead. Either I'd catch up with Leah, or I'd introduce myself properly to Darius. Either one seemed like a good option.

I found Leah in the last place I expected to—St. Macabre's, checking on the Nurse. She jumped and screamed when I tapped her on the shoulder, which, in all fairness, was a pretty stupid move on my part. I'd scream if you sneaked up behind me in St. Macabre's, too. Yeah, even with the effects lighting off. Something about the acoustics in there makes the echoes way louder than they seem like they should be. Dale explained to me once how it works, but that didn't make it any less creepy.

Once Leah composed herself, she told me Darius was out sick with food poisoning, so she checked in to give him a day off. We headed for Mr. Scratch's cage, and on the way I found myself telling her about the Pianist and the sudden creepy appearance of a very personally significant and totally incongruous piece of music. Leah got this sudden look of despair I'd never seen on her face before, not even facing down Warin.

“It's because of me, Nathan.” I haven't seen a smile that sad in my entire life. “It wouldn't matter so much if you were asking because you and Dale were getting back together, I don't think. But you're not.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again I saw tears standing in them. “I know what's happening to me."

“I'm going to find a way to stop it. You did it once, I can too. Especially since what happened to you was outside the contract. I found your blog, I've got all the same information you had. There's a way around it. I know there is."

She shook her head at me. She looked almost frantic, doing it. “You don't get it, do you? You were the one who got away. They're _pissed_ about you, Nathan. They won't let it happen again that easily. It'd take something really drastic to get me out of here. And I don't think any of us have that kind of bargaining chip. Just . . . keep me company, while I still know you?”

“Please, you have a massive DVD collection and a couch. You're stuck with me.”

Leah started laughing, the kind of watery laugh you make when you're about to cry. “Tell Dale I want a _good_ shed. And if anybody calls me Indiana Jane because of the whip he has to punch them.”

I shook my head right back at her, and then did something I remembered my mother doing, when I was a kid: took her face in both hands to make her look right at me.

“You didn't give up on me. I'm not giving up on you.”

She hugged me, and I hugged back. And pretended not to notice when she started soaking through my shirt crying. Mr. Scratch nuzzled up against her, but she actually ignored him. Or didn't realize he was there, maybe. She started out trying to be quiet, but eventually she gave up on pretending she wasn't sobbing, and I don't think a whole lot of outside stuff was getting through. 

I ended up being the one who drove us home. Dale texted to ask if everything was okay when he saw us leaving. I told him I'd call him later, but after I got Leah fed and showered and in bed I ended up texting him instead.

_Leah knows._

_Shit._

_Speak for both of us, why don't you._

_Everything else okay?_

_I'm pretty sure I was warned off today._

_Are you calling it quits?_

_Not a chance in hell._

_Then stay safe._

I probably shouldn't have sent him anything else, but it was two in the morning and I have yet to see a single good decision made after midnight.

_Hey, Dale?_

_Yeah?_

_Why did you never come?_

That was two hours ago. I didn't mean to stay awake so long, but I started looking at my notes and trying to piece together what I know, and when I looked at the clock again and realized he'd never answered me I decided to go to bed. I'm not really tired, but it'll pass the time until daylight again.

Maybe I'll go see the Diva tomorrow.


	9. I'm A Laughing Cowboy

Sorry for the long break between updates, everyone. I didn't see much point in rehashing the same things over and over. I've got a few things I can share, though.

First things first, the Diva. I made a second attempt at talking to her, trying to find out how the hell the Pianist might have known a song from the turn of the century. It was a total bust--I ran into the same thing Leah did, with the Diva just repeating things over and over. So I tried a third time once my contacts came in, this time in more or less the same direction Leah had tried. It's embarrassing, but I guess I have to tell you what happened. I'm going to tell you the same thing I told Oliver when I showed up in Hollywood wearing a pair of chinos and a polo shirt with my hair slicked back: don't laugh.

Or do, I guess I can admit when I'm ridiculous.

We tracked her down, Oliver in normal street clothes and me in my terrible 1950s-nerd cosplay, and when we finally found her perched in a photo booth I used the same trick I used to use to get out of trouble at school: letting myself go all but bug-eyed and dropping my mouth open until I felt just a little bit like the village idiot, and then letting out the most holy-shit-I-can't-believe-it "oh my _gosh_ " before breaking into a flood of starstruck babble as soon as she looked at me.

"Oh. Oh my _gosh._ It's--" I grabbed Oliver's arm. "Is that _her?_ That's _really_ \--" I let go and tried to push the facial expression just a little more into crazed-N*Sync-fan territory. "It's _really you._ " I think I actually scared Oliver a little when I turned that face on him. He didn't exactly know what I was planning when we went in. "Could you _die?_ "

The Diva kind of tilted her head at me. I covered my mouth with both hands. "Oh. Gosh. I'm so sorry. I just--I can't believe it's _actually you._ Oliver said you might be here, but I didn't think I'd ever get the chance to _meet_ you. Oh. _Wow._ "

"What a lovely thing to say!" She patted the chair next to hers. "Here, won't you sit with me?"

"Oh, I--I, I _couldn't_ ," I told her. She gave me this _look._ Apparently whatever programming she runs is pretty narrow, because I was pretty sure I had about half a second to fix things before she disappeared. "I-I-I mean, you wouldn't want to sit with me. I'm, I'm nobody. I'm just--a fan."

"Just a fan," Oliver echoed, voice dripping with sarcasm. "He was losing his mind as soon as I told him I knew you."

"Goodness, dearie, please," the Diva said, and patted the chair again. I sat down next to her.

"Gosh. Um, I, uh--thank--thank you." Part of me almost wished Dale was around for this. I don't know if he remembers sneaking photos on one of those disposable cameras while we were in keyboarding class and I was definitely not playing SimCity instead of doing the practice paragraphs, but I remember it, and I get the impression he could do with the laugh these days. Not my responsibility, not my problem, I shouldn't care, I know, I know. Letting go hasn't ever been my strong point.

"What can I help you with, dear?"

"Um. I, uh, well . . . " I looked around like somebody other than Oliver might be around. "Everybody knows you're an absolute genius. I mean, some of the stuff you _do_ . . . "

"Why, thank you, dear!" She gave me this huge Hollywood grin. "Would you like a picture with me?"

"No, I--" I was partway through it when I remembered that was exactly how Leah exploded her the first time. "I mean, I _do_ , but I don't think I have my camera. I can't believe I forgot it." I drooped down into the chair as dramatically as I could.

"I've got my phone. Scoot together." Oliver waved at us. I waited for the shutter to click. The Diva opened her mouth, and I was pretty sure she was going to send me on my way.

"Please, won't you tell me what you did before?"

She looked puzzled. "Before? Why, I was born here, dear. I've lived here all my life. I was predestined for Hollywood life, it seems."

"I--I mean, yes, but . . . " The problem with opening your mouth when you haven't had a chance to think is, you have no idea what you meant. That's true for me, at least. "What I mean is, if you read books or news articles they always say 'she made her breakthrough' but what did you do _before_ that? Before anybody really realized how, how _amazing_ you are?"

I was sure I was going to get the same answer she gave Leah, about having always been there. I was mostly just trying to hold her in place.

But then she turned to me, and her eye twitched, and she grabbed my hand. I waited.

"I was a singer at a fair," she said, and then the literal meltdown started.

She disappeared for two days after that. I wasn't a fan of doing it, but I finally took a plate of fruit and milk to the central bathroom and left it outside the locked stall as an apology. She was back the next morning like nothing ever happened. Oliver told me she didn't seem to remember the conversation at all, but I picked up this vintage hair comb online and took it to her, and she put it in her hair at once. I'm glad for that, at least. I think I put her through an awful lot of trouble.

Also, there's the matter of payment, which I was really hoping the hair comb covered because she doesn't speak enough to negotiate and it was _not_ cheap.

Dale and I haven't talked outside manager-and-employee interactions. We've only had one major conversation, and it involved me calling him and asking him if he knew the commercial that was filmed when we were literally in high school was still airing. It scared the shit out of me when I saw it, actually. Dale's in it, leading a line dance in one of the Twin Vale saloons--in fact the first thing I ever said to him when we met at school was "you're the kid with the boots in the park commercials"--and of course there's a whole big deal about how it's been family-owned and operated for over 100 years, but whoever cut it apparently decided the best way to emphasize this was doing a crossfade from Dale to Warin. Not that the person doing the editing would have known just how sick that was, of course, but for the first time I realized just how alike they look. I figured Dale might want Warin out of the commercial--and I don't want to see it again. No matter what ends up happening between us, Dale doesn't deserve being compared to that monster. And the edit was just way too close for comfort. It's going to take me a long time to unsee it.

Caroline told me the other day she gets now why I thought he was cute, though, and I managed to time things well enough to spot him in the office without him seeing me. He shaved, and it looks like he actually bought a hairbrush to deal with the mane. On one hand, I'm glad--I've been the person with the dirty hair and unbrushed teeth and it _sucks._ On the other, I really don't want him doing it just because he wants to impress me. I didn't sign up to be responsible for him being an adult.

And finally, Leah. The transformation seems to have stalled out. I'm not sure if we've reached the end of what Warin did to her, or if it's just taking awhile to reach the next step. Either way, she's been pretty cheerful the last couple of days. We went out for lunch yesterday with the whole acting crew, and they gave me a walkie-talkie and a flask. The flask confused me until Oliver pointed out I'm going to be out in the sun for hours at a time in jeans and leather and long sleeves, and I can fit an entire bottle of Gatorade in there. I suggested to Leah we get her one and she told me she keeps a couple of bottles in the breakroom. The horror section is the smallest one, so it's not hard for her to step in from time to time.

Fair enough, I guess, but I'm still going to get her one. It's less about the drink and more about the reminder to do it.

Today was pretty cool, though, except for one thing I'll get to later. The park opened to the general public today, so I was out in full costume for the first time—chaps and fake revolver and everything. Dale unearthed the rules for being a pretenderless actor, probably from Laila's old file. They're pretty simple: pick a character name and answer to it while in the presence of parkgoers, always stay in character when you're onstage, hand-to-hand contact with parkgoers—like handshakes and high-fives—is okay but any other contact is strictly forbidden. The park doesn't open til noon, so we get dinner, not lunch. It starts at four and runs through seven, and you get an hour but you can never have both actors from a single section offstage at the same time.

I'm Martin Eastwood, but you can call me Marty.

Oliver seems to be the only one who caught the reference when I shared my new alias this morning, but when he did he laughed so hard Sprite came out his nose. We spent a minute swapping favorite quotes back and forth, to everyone else's confusion, and then we did a last-minute go-over on the opening day gameplan, and then we all split up to go to our respective sections.

I spent most of my morning hanging out with little kids and taking pictures, and being pissed at Warin for a reason completely unrelated to me ending up on the stagecoach: he got to do this for years, the bastard, and I bet he never even properly enjoyed it.

I also got one very scandalized mother asking if I was drinking liquor on Main Street when I pulled out my flask. It was actually cherry Gatorade, but I told her it was sarsaparilla and I would never be so crass. I'm not sure what offended her more, the answer or me staying movie-polite while giving it. You can't win them all, I guess.

Dinner was 4:30 for me today, but I ended up not really eating it. I brought in enough lasagna for everyone to have a hot lunch, and most of the breakrooms have microwaves, but I was only four bites into mine when the walkie-talkie decided to yell “I need help in Candyland, _now_ , please” in Maxine's way-too-panicked voice.

I was mostly out of costume—I didn't bother changing out of the flannel shirt or the jeans, but the vest and chaps and stuff are a pain to sit in and I didn't want to spill on them, so I stripped down to basics when I got in for dinner—so I didn't have to worry about being in character when I sprinted out and headed straight for Candyland, doing a mental checklist as I went. Candyland is off-limits to Darius because of his costume, Mitchell couldn't leave the stagecoach without going all the way to the back of the park, Leah would have to put up Mr. Scratch before she could even think about leaving horror, and whether or not Anne was free depended entirely on what the Mime was up to.

Oliver and I, probably by virtue of being the only two able to run, got to Candyland first, almost crashing into Dale and Madeleine at the entrance. Anne was soothing a little girl having a complete meltdown. Her mother was livid. Dale headed straight for the girl and her mom and Oliver and I went hunting for Maxine.

It didn't take long to find her, starfished around the Sugar Plum Fairy under the stage. It was like watching someone have a whole-body fight with a pair of cats. Oliver caught my eye.

“Count of three?”

“Sounds good.”

We counted, and grabbed the Fairy's arms to drag her out. I don't know how gentle Oliver was being, but I didn't bother a bit. Her entire face was out. No wonder that poor kid was having a fit. Maxine rolled over twice until she could find her feet under her hoop skirts, and stood up.

“Trailer,” she gasped, and sort of waved in the direction I assumed we'd need to go. “She needs put in.”

We marched the Fairy to the trailer and locked her in. There were a few random thumping noises, and then silence. She'd probably started dancing again.

Maxine had a hell of a cut on her arm, probably from the Fairy's beak. I told Oliver to go ahead and head back to Hollywood, and I headed for the front entrance with Maxine, who was trying not to bleed on her dress. The family I'd seen on my way in was missing, but I could see the light on in Dale's office. We headed that way just in time to see the mom leading her little girl toward Hollywood. I grabbed Dale's door before it could swing shut and pushed Maxine inside.

“Is she going to be okay?”

He didn't have to ask what I was talking about. At this point Maxine had given up on saving the dress--she was pressing huge wads of it to her arm to try and stop the bleeding. Dale got up and pulled the dress away from her arm so delicately you'd think he was a surgeon, not a park manager. Maxine gave me this kind of gobsmacked look over his shoulder that would've been funny if I wasn't worried about her health and humanity. None of the others, except Leah, have gotten to see Dale in not-a-manager mode before.

“Did you see spit?”

“No, but I wasn't really looking. That little girl grabbed her tutu and she lost it. I just tried to get her out of arm's reach before the kid could get hurt. She's so little.”

“Yeah, she's four,” Dale agreed, still looking at Maxine's arm. “Her mom thinks it was a malfunctioning animatronic. Fairy's put away right now?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He looked up at me. “I'm pretty sure she's going to need stitches. Can you take her?”

“I don't have a car.”

Dale snagged his keys from a hook off the wall and handed them to me. “Black truck, end of the first row. There should be a blanket in there you can use on her arm.”

There was. There was also a stick shift, and I wanted to beat my head on the wheel because Dale is the one who taught me to drive stick and I didn't have that long to learn before I ended up driving a pair of reins instead, but at least I had some idea what I was doing, and honestly I should've expected it. I'm pretty sure Dale's never owned anything with an automatic transmission in his life.

Anyway, I got Maxine to the hospital and only stalled out once on the way, and the ER staff—after we got it straightened out that I'm her coworker, not her brother, but Maxine was still okay with me being in her room—bought the story about the electronic puppet gone wrong.

Maxine ended up with thirteen stitches. She normally rides in with Caroline or one of the other guys, so I dropped her at home and told her to get some rest. She said she'd throw the dress in some cold water and see if she couldn't get the blood out before bed. I told her I thought she was crazy, but she just kind of started laughing. All of us have three costumes—the idea is one in the wash, one you're wearing today, and one you'll wear tomorrow—but I guess she's got a point, the princess dress would be pretty annoying to try to replace.

I didn't get back to the park until after sunset—close to closing. Dale met me in the parking lot and told me Maxine would be fine; he'd already heard from upper management, and filled out incident paperwork for the health and safety people. I wanted to hug him until that exhausted look got out of his eyes, but I didn't. That's a dangerous road I'm not ready to travel down.

So that was the first day back at the park. Leah heated up some leftovers when we got home so I could have actual food.

I'm about ready to sack out, but I figured I'd update you guys. I'd say "hopefully tomorrow is less eventful," but I get the feeling it's going to be one hell of an interesting summer.


	10. I'm Just Perplexed

There was a letter waiting for me in the breakroom today when I got in.

It was from Dale, of course, and—surprisingly—handwritten. Dale's always been embarrassed about his handwriting; his printing is the kind of utilitarian blocks and slashes you see a lot on stuff like order manifests, and his cursive is just straight-up illegible. I tried teaching him the same script my grandmother taught me, but he never got it. The entire time we were together he did everything he could to get around writing things down—recording cassette tapes, typing letters, texting me a grocery list instead of leaving it on the counter—to the point that if he had to handwrite something for business, he'd ask if I could transcribe it for him. I wondered, while I was unfolding the paper, what he did for handwritten business after I was gone.

He started off with _I still don't know how to give you the explanation you deserve_ , and then, well . . . he tried.

He told Leah I wouldn't understand, and he managed to pull off giving me too much credit and not enough at the same time. The reason he chose to trap me like he did was a case of no good options: either I was turned, or people in both the park and his family would start getting picked off one by one, and it wouldn't stop until he gave in, no matter how many people it took to change his mind. Having agreed to give me up, he was given a further choice: he could do the job himself or he could turn me over to the Wild Ones. _If Leah told you what happened to her, you may understand why I couldn't take that option,_ he said, and he was right: if somebody back then had told me I had to turn Dale over for some kind of sadistic ritual that would involve the gleeful violation of every part of his body and spirit, I think I would've lost my mind. Hell, if somebody gave me the same choice today I'd tell them to go fuck themselves, and we're not even together anymore. His other option was to sit with me, talk to me, comfort me . . . lie to me. No good option there, either, but at least marginally better. I could understand that choice.

What I couldn't understand was him saying how worried he was about his parents. My parents turned on a dime and kicked me out when I was still a teenager, but at least they were honest. I'm not sure Dale's parents care if he lives or dies, as long as the park keeps going. Why he'd lose his mind over them is beyond me, and I guess maybe it's the difference between feeling like you've got a family and not, because he's right: I didn't understand that part, not at all.

And he still didn't tell me why he never so much as stopped by to say hello. I don't know if he's ducking the question or hasn't figured out how to put it in words.

I was still sitting at the breakroom table when Mitchell came in and pushed a totally different envelope in front of me.

“Hey, it's payday,” he said, and I jumped, because there's no way he should've been able to get up behind me that quietly in a pair of cowboy boots. Then I realized he was wearing sneakers. “Dale asked if I'd bring yours down. He's gotta leave early today.”

“I bet.” I guess if I wrote four pages about something I called the worst day of my life, I wouldn't want to hang around for another twelve hours to talk about it either. “Hey, Oliver said there's a freezer somewhere on the grounds we're allowed to use.”

“Yeah, it's in Hollywood. The ice cream parlor has this thing that looks like a fridge but it's actually a freezer. The bottom shelf is ours.”

“Hell yeah, I'm gonna bring a cheesecake tomorrow.” I grabbed my cowboy vest to shrug it on, and Mitchell kind of gave me this sideways grin.

“The fuck were you planning to do with the rest of your life, Nathan, be a chef?”

“Nah. My dad wanted me to go into the family business, but I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher.”

Mitchell stopped halfway through putting on his bolo tie. “Yeah? What's the family business?”

“Being a Baptist preacher.”

Apparently I get to be the funny one on crew now, because Mitchell started laughing so hard he had to sit down. “And here—here—oh, _fuck_ ,” he said, but he was kind of wheezing, like the words and the laughing were both trying to cram out one tiny door and neither one could fit all the way. “Here you fuckin' are.”

“And here I fuckin' am. Wearing a cowboy hat and being told I look like Dulé Hill by a bunch of people who can't remember his actual name.”

Mitchell kind of gave me this _look._ “Man, you look _way_ too young to be Dulé Hill.”

“The guy from Holes?”

“The guy from Suits. Probably the same guy, huh?”

I just shrugged—I've never heard of Suits, but there can't be that many Dulé Hills in Hollywood—and finished adjusting my belt. One thing nobody ever tells you about those old Westerns, carrying a gun (even a fake one) and a flask and a coin bag gets damned heavy. It's enough to make me want to throw suspenders on under the vest.

I should probably tell you a little about how Twin Vale is set up, if you really want to get a feel for it. There are five streets in Twin Vale: Main, First, Second, Gold, and Union. Main, First, and Union all cross right in the middle of Twin Vale, like an asterisk. Second is this little alley off the far end of Main, where the stagecoach meadow and the breakroom are. It's also what you might call backstage—you'll find maintenance equipment back there, sometimes some out of service ride pieces or furniture, that kind of thing. Gold is just a ring that runs from the end of Second out around the edge of Twin Vale. It's mostly just a place to get the horses turned around so you can come back down a different road, if you're on the coach. There are a few rides, all from close to the park's opening—a wooden roller coaster, this super-old ride from the 1910s called The Caterpillar—but the main draw down here is stuff like photo booths and, of course, the saloons. They're both actually restaurants, but with the exception of the Pianist's restaurant, they're also the only place in the park to get alcohol. I like the smaller one, on Union, because they make really good barbecue and sometimes if I can get there right at closing they've got leftovers, but the bigger one is a great place to hang out and look for kids because it's at the foot of Main right where the three streets meet.

Mostly, I need you to understand how _big_ Twin Vale is. Hollywood is bigger, but not by much. It honestly kind of surprises me sometimes there aren't more actors down here.

Why do I need you to get this? Because you need to understand why I was ready to just cram my chicken in my face and nap for my entire break by the time it came around at six. I didn't actually have a pedometer with me, but it wouldn't surprise me if I'd managed to walk seven or eight miles just in the time since noon. And so: time to crash.

I actually did exactly that, and when I woke up it was because a very small set of fingers was poking my face. I almost swore, and then tried to swear in cowboy because why a child would be in the breakroom was beyond me but _stay in character_ , and then I realized it was Madeleine.

“Hey, kiddo, what's up?”

Madeleine just kind of gave me this sad little shake of her head. Taking over Warin's job meant giving up her voice, and she seems pretty okay with signing and pantomiming most of the time, but it's also pretty easy to tell when she's frustrated by things she just can't get across.

“Can you show me?”

She pointed at my phone, and I unlocked it before handing it to her. She opened my photos and started scrolling. There's not much in there, and most of it is reaction images, but she found what she was looking for and passed my phone back, tapping the screen aggressively.

“Leah?”

She nodded.

“Is she okay? Like right-now okay, not . . . you know, in general?”

She nodded again.

“Is this about her . . . turning?”

Another nod. Then she reached into my lunch bag, found a peach I hadn't eaten yet, pointed at my phone, and threw the peach into the trash with more force than any kid her age should be able to muster. Then she pointed at the phone again, did this kind of dramatic pirouette, grabbed her ears, pulled them down, and fell over.

Guessing games like this aren't nearly as entertaining as TV makes them out to be.

“Okay, so . . . no fruit for Leah . . . . ”

Madeleine sat up and nodded.

“Because it'll kill her?”

She shook her head and grabbed her ears again. Then her whiskers, and then the sides of her face, shaking her head back and forth.

“She'll turn into an animal?” I could see her getting ready to give up; _close enough_ , basically. I ran back over her charades. “It'll make her turn into a pretender more quickly.”

More nodding, so frantic I was afraid she'd give herself a headache.

“She barely eats fruit to start with, I think it'll be fine—”

Frantic head-shaking. She scissored her hands back and forth— _no way, nope, no, no._

“No eating fruit at all?”

More nodding. Then she looked at the clock on the breakroom wall and covered her nose with both hands. I followed her line of sight and said something I really shouldn't have said in front of a six-year-old.

Seven-ten. I overshot my break.

Madeleine pushed me out the door. My chaps were still inside, but I didn't exactly have time to go back, and I had the hat and belt, so I was recognizable enough.

I booked it down to Main to see if I could find Mitchell. Sunset wasn't until after eight today, but sometimes it's good to get the horses in early—they go a little nuts even before it's time for them to go up for the night, once in awhile.

As luck would have it, he'd actually tied the coach outside the smaller saloon. It's called Jack's Place, and if you're onstage but really need something to drink it's out-of-the-way enough to grab a pop or some water without being bombarded, which is exactly what Mitchell was doing. I sat down next to him and asked for a root beer old-fashioned, which is actually just a root beer in a cocktail glass about half the size of a regular pop glass. Helps to keep from wasting too much time at the bar.

I told him what Madeleine told me, and he just kind of shook his head when I asked if he'd ever heard of anything like it before.

“But man, if she's warning you about it, I think you might want to put a lock on the fridge. Otherwise why wouldn't she just tell Leah herself?”

“Yeah. Gonna have to get the fruit out of the apartment altogether, I think.” I took a big swig of root beer. I don't know what brand is actually served on the grounds, but I guarantee it's not whatever Coke or Pepsi pass off as root beer. “Am I supposed to tell her, though? Like am I supposed to keep this a secret? Is it supposed to _tell_ me something? I'm lost.”

Mitchell just shook his head again. Then he stood up.

“I'll see if anything comes to me, but honestly, I don't know. Keep me posted. I've got to get the horses put up before they go psycho, 'kay?”

“I will,” I told him, and I finished up my root beer and followed him out. I was most of the way back to the main plaza when it hit me, this poem out of one of Dale's books that I read years ago, about a girl who ate fruit she bought from goblins.

I picked up all the fruit in Leah's fridge at the same grocery store where I stocked the rest of her cupboard, but who knows where it started before that? And sure, I paid for it with the last of Dale's gift, money actually changed hands, but if somebody wanted to claim the price wasn't fair . . .

I don't think I'm going to put strawberries on that cheesecake.


	11. I'm a Menace, Apparently

Work was canceled today.

I got the call from Dale around seven-thirty this morning. Normally the park stays open if the weather's questionable, because in this part of the world if you don't like the weather you wait five minutes, but the forecast today was severe thunderstorms and flash floods from three in the morning all the way through to midnight. Even if it lets up later in the day, nobody's going to go out, and there's going to be maintenance at the park. Gary's going to have his hands full with downed trees, probably. Hopefully it's only trees, and not power lines.

Dale hates thunderstorms, but I love them. My only problem is they make me want to do everything, all at once, and there's only so much you can do when the whole world is putting on a Vegas-worthy light display, so by the time I was done making way too many freezable meals and helping Leah mop and vacuum and running my stuff down to the laundry room and back up again, Leah was ready for a nap and I was ready to crawl the walls out of sheer boredom.

I told you. Thunderstorms are like that. Even after spending ten years with nothing between me and the rain but a lean-to big enough for the stagecoach and not much else, thunderstorms are like that.

I finally ended up texting Oliver and harassing him into playing Words With Friends when the power went out and I couldn't watch any more Iron Chef. Challenging him might have been the most entertaining mistake of my life. I had no idea he was an English major.

Also, I know what “ubiquitous” means now.

And Oliver knows coriander and cilantro are the same thing unless you're in the US, so I guess we both learned something.

The power came back on, but the TV said it couldn't connect to wifi—and honestly I'd really like to know when somebody decided televisions needed to connect to the internet—so I was going to try to take a nap myself when my phone chimed.

It was Dale, who wanted to know if we could get coffee. _As friends,_ he specified. _Or coworkers, if you like that better._

I thought we'd go to Denny's or something, but we ended up at Starbucks. There was a covered porch, and the lightning was settled enough to sit outside without a deathwish, so we did.

I was afraid it was going to be an hour of awkward silence and trying to pretend everything was totally normal, but instead we sat for a little while watching the rain in that kind of quiet where you don't really need to say anything. Dale asked if I wanted to see the first cut of the new park commercial, and passed me his phone so I could watch it. I was kind of surprised to see myself in it. I didn't even know I'd been filmed, but I guess it makes sense--it was pretty obviously shot on opening day, if you know anything about how the park works. I probably missed the cameras in the crush.

"I'm gonna miss those boots," I told him, and pushed the phone back. "Neon green on bright purple, now _that_ was a fashion statement."

Dale snorted. "I got them so people could see better," he said. "Dad wanted me doing it in sneakers. Deanna finally argued him into it. She said she wanted us to match."

I was going to share my opinion on Rick and his issues with Dale being allowed to make the same terrible teenage fashion choices as every other teenager in the history of clothes, but the lightning flashed again, so bright the entire sky went white and the world turned into the inside of a drum. I started laughing. Dale swore and almost fell off his chair.

“That was cool.”

“You're a menace, Nate.”

“That's me, spreading food and chaos everywhere I go. I've got a peach crisp in the car for you, by the way. I made it night before last and then Madeleine told me I couldn't let Leah eat fruit and I didn't want to waste it.”

Dale looked grim. “I can't tell you why, but she's right.”

I sort of shrugged at him. “I mean, it's a huge thing in folklore, isn't it? Don't eat fae food? Especially if you think you're bewitched? I don't know what makes all fruit fae food, but that's kind of—”

Dale shook his head. “It's safe for you to eat. Just not her. And I can't tell you anything more than that.”

“I don't want you to tell me anything more than that.”

I didn't plan to tell him about the Pianist, but it kind of spilled out. Trying to keep it to myself was stupid, anyway. I've never been able to keep secrets. Not from Dale, at least. He shook his head at me again, but this time more like he was disappointed. No—not disappointed. That little not-a-smile he gave me when he told me to drive the stagecoach was back.

“I think it's probably a good thing for the fate of the entire world we don't need you to be some CIA secret agent, what's his face. James Bond.”

“Fuck James Bond, I want to be a Bond boy. All I'd have to do is wear tight pants and shoot things and have sex with Daniel Craig. I could live with that. If I survived to the end of the movie, anyway.” I was trying for just a little sarcastic, hoping he'd laugh, but he didn't. There's only so far gallows humor can take you when it comes to lightening the mood.

“I see Leah's been indulging your total lack of taste.” He sighed. “I'm sure they're watching you as closely as they watch me. Leah really caught them by surprise. And I'm not sure they totally understand what's going on with us right now—”

“Forget the Wild Ones, _I_ don't totally understand what's going on with us right now.”

Dale kind of waved his hand—the kind of wave you only get when you've known someone long enough to tell the difference between acknowledgment and dismissal. “But they know . . . . they know I still care about you. And they know you're a threat. They wanted Leah dead. She might be turning because of an overstepped contract, but they're not going to let her go that easily. Actually, I think they might go well beyond their normal efforts to keep her.” He paused. “That, I can tell you. It's not really anything you don't already know.”

“I don't want any information here. I just want an opinion.” I waited until he looked right at me—I knew I had his attention already, but I wanted to see it. “Do you think it's too late for me to help her? Don't say you don't know. Just tell me what your gut says.”

Dale leaned back in his chair. He looked like he was sifting things over in his head.

“I _don't_ know, Nate, that's the thing. This is all new. Nobody's ever tried it in the entire history of the contract. Not as far as I know, at least. I'm not even sure how I've been able to talk to you all as much as I have. Because Leah already shared the contract with you all, I guess. I think if you forced me to say yes or no I'd lean maybe-to-yes. But I'd also say if I know anyone who can find their way to a win from what should've been an unwinnable situation, it's you.”

I just kind of nodded and played with my straw. He's right, the odds are so high I should just try winning the lottery instead, but even though I wanted him to be honest with me I didn't _really_ want him to be honest, if that makes any sense.

We sat for a little longer, and then the rain started really coming down again. Dale looked at Leah's car and kind of raised his eyebrows at me. I shrugged. I was hoping to get to the library again, but I'd never make it with the rain falling so heavy the windshield wipers would be a formality.

“Mind if I follow you home?”

“Oh, you're a _polite_ stalker,” I said, and this time he did laugh. He actually snorted so hard I thought he'd choke on his drink, but he coughed once or twice and got back on top of it.

“No offense to Leah's car, but if you hit anything even approaching a puddle you're not going to make it. The body on that thing is way too low for this weather.”

“Yeah, not my smartest decision ever.” I thought about it for a minute. “You can make sure I get back okay. I don't mind.”

Leah was watching Hell's Kitchen when I got back. I think it was Hell's Kitchen. Might have been Kitchen Nightmares. Something with Gordon Ramsay screaming at people, anyway.

“Good date?”

“It wasn't a date, but nice try.”

She gave me this kind of somber look. “Learn anything?”

“Yeah, Dale's a vampire. He'll follow you everywhere but you have to invite him first.”

Leah laughed until she turned red in the face. I waited until she got down to giggles before making the _yeah?_ face at her.

“Sorry, I just—” She put her palms at the bottom of her neck, fanning her hands up the side of her face. “I imagined him in the _collar_ —”

And then she was off again. It is pretty funny, I've got to give her that one. But more importantly, it distracted her. I didn't want to have to dance around him telling me it might be too late.

I just hope he's wrong.


	12. I'm A Horse Thief, Apparently

Sometimes the stuff that happens in this job is so intense without the Wild Ones even having to get involved, I have to wonder how the people at Disney do it.

Today started off with another one of Dale's weird, cryptic texts to the entire crew. _Early call. 10am. New post discussions._

I'd love to tell you he knows how to communicate like a normal human being and he's just really terse in work texts, but after our first date he just sent me _Tuesday?_ like I was supposed to know he was asking if I had time for lunch.

Anyway, Leah and I showed up at a quarter to ten, Leah puzzled and me trying not to throw up. The last time I heard “new position” . . . well, you know how that ended.

We all gathered in the Pianist's restaurant. I was waiting for him to wig out again, but he didn't. I caught Oliver's eye, and he nodded a little, so while we waited for Dale I headed for the piano.

“Hey, do you take requests?”

The Pianist raised his eyebrows at me. I took it as a yes.

“Could you play Lux Aeterna?”

He frowned that kind of slightly-disturbed smile really rich people use to say _you're a fucking idiot._ “I'm afraid I'm not familiar.”

I glanced over at Oliver and shrugged a little. He shrugged back. “Never mind, then. Thank you.” I dropped a buck into his jar. I have no idea where that money goes, but it seemed rude not to, and anyway, he gave me information. I had to pay him for it.

And then Dale finally walked in, five minutes late, and dropped a bag on our table with a loud _clunk._

“So let's be clear, nobody is on the streets at all between one and four, unless there's an emergency. You can stay in later if you think you need to. Leah, Nathan, Mitchell, especially you three. Most of you can trust your judgment on whether the pretenders go away while you're indoors, but Scratch and the mime absolutely have to. Might not even be worth letting the mime out until four. Fairy stays in until then, too. Everywhere on the grounds that sells beverages knows if any of you show up and ask for something between four and six they should give you soda water—the hell are you all looking at me that way for?” He glanced at me, and I guess he realized he didn't make any more sense to me than he did to anyone else, because he let out this long-suffering sigh. “Am I the only person here who watches the weather report?”

“Probably,” Darius told him. “I never bother, it's always wrong anyway.”

“Jesus _Christ!_ ” Mitchell, insightful as always, staring at his phone like he thought it was going to bite him. “A hundred and _three?_ ”

“Mine says a hundred and five,” Anne commented, looking like a little kid who just lost her ice cream on the sidewalk. “All week? When do we _ever_ get weather like this?”

“It happened my sophomore year,” I told them. “The week we were supposed to run the mile. Half of us faked sick just to get out of it. Coach was a Marine, he didn't give a _shit_ if it was 98 degrees.”

“So we're just . . . not going to be outside? What about parkgoers?” Leah gave Dale this look like she might nail him to the wall with eye-daggers alone. “You're going to let them in?”

“There'll be a heat advisory posted, and people can choose to visit indoor attractions. Or to not come. But you eight are usually supposed to be outside, all the time. If you're indoors it keeps you safe and it encourages other people to be inside, too. So you're getting indoor posts for the hottest part of the day.” He pointed around to each of us in turn. “Oliver, you'll be here. Caroline, same for you. Encourage the Diva to stay in here, but if she wanders off, let her go. Darius, St. Macabre's. Anne, you'll be in Fezziwig's.” I didn't even know where I was going yet, and I was already jealous. Fezziwig's is a soda fountain. It's been there at least since the forties, and it's barely changed. There's still a soda jerker and everything. “Mitchell, you're going to be at Jack's Place. Nathan, you'll be in Doc and Kitty's.”

“Oh, come on, why does he get to go to Jack's?” Whining isn't my prettiest personality trait, I know, but Doc and Kitty's _sucks._ It's the bigger of the two saloons, often standing room only, and if you're going to run into somebody in Twin Vale who wants to be a problem, Doc and Kitty's is where you'll find them. It's not really a saloon, or even a Western-themed restaurant—it's more like a hipster's idea of what a saloon-themed restaurant should be. Jack's is the small one with good barbecue and a bartender who actually knows how to do some of the cool tricks you see in movies.

The bad thing about Dale being my kind-of-boyfriend is, he's had plenty of time to grow an immunity.

“Because for some unknown reason, people keep telling me you're _charming,_ and Doc and Kitty's is just off the main plaza.”

“Just stick me in a sandwich board, why don't you.” I thought I mumbled it, but apparently it was loud enough, because he shot right back at me.

“Don't tempt me. Leah, you're in the arcade. You can move between the coffee shop and the games, but don't head into the ride section. Maxine, you'll be in King Arthur's. There's an old throne display in there that's usually empty. It'll be lit today for you. I expect all of you to be carrying something to drink.” He tipped over his bag, and I watched a series of bottles roll across the table: Gatorade, Smartwater, Pedialyte. “If you pass out because of heat or dehydration, you had all the tools to keep yourself safe and didn't use them and I don't feel sorry for you.”

“Dibs on mango!” Oliver yelled, and when we were done swarming the drinks Dale rolled his eyes at us all and shooed us off to get dressed.

I was kind of hoping the heat would hold off long enough I could stay out of Doc and Kitty's until two, but Dale apparently had an eagle eye on that forecast; we went onstage at noon and by twelve-thirty I was sweating through my shirt. I ended up heading in early, instead.

Most weekdays this early in the season are young adults who either want to be ten again and come off as totally delightful, or adults of various ages who, for some reason, come to an amusement park in spite of hating joy. I was expecting Doc and Kitty's to be full of the second kind, but instead when I sauntered in—I won't lie, I did the batwing-door thing and everything—there was just one group of six girls, apparently having a party because one of them had just gotten her first apartment. They waved me over as soon as they spotted me. Sometimes fun adults are even better than the little kids, because you can't say “you're moving _all_ of these fine young ladies into your, uh, new property, ma'am?” to a five-year-old, and even if you could the reaction would be really underwhelming.

They insisted on getting me a drink, so I asked them to get me a house highball. Fun fact you might not know—if you're at a bar, don't bother going up to the bartender and asking for a house special. Whatever you get isn't going to have any alcohol in it. It's a drink they hold in reserve specifically for employees who can't say no without upsetting a patron. I served my fair share of them when I was working in Casablanca, and the house highball is pretty good. It's simple syrup, pineapple juice, and soda water, but when you add the word “house” in the park you also get a couple of drops of food coloring so it looks like it's actually whiskey, or champagne, or whatever kind of drink the glass type works with.

This is where I started realizing my backstory was absolute shit. If I'd realized I was going to need to entertain an entire group of giggly, flirty twentysomethings by myself, in character, I would've done a better job putting it together. Finally I sneaked into my “wallet”—by which I mean one of those leather bags you see on men's belts in the better class of Western movies—and found my phone, and did what I hoped was sending Mitchell a text: _help me!_

Maybe Dale isn't the only one with bad texting skills, actually.

Anyway, Mitchell showed up in about ten minutes flat, which isn't bad for running across two-thirds of Twin Vale. Everybody in the bar shot up to look at him, because he wasn't exactly quiet about coming in, and while heads were turned I made a _get me out of here_ face at him and kind of gestured at the table. I had no idea how he was supposed to do it, but I knew I was going to blow character if I stayed.

“Martin Eastwood,” Mitchell said, and put a hand on his prop gun. “You're under arrest, under the authority given to me by law.”

I had no idea how to pull off a Jack Sparrow grin, but I gave it a shot anyway. “Sheriff. And as you can see I haven't done a thing but keep company with these lovely ladies.”

“Eastwood, you're wanted everywhere from here to Tombstone. Embezzlement, horse theft, holding up a mail coach, hunting on Sioux land, breach of promise, and I don't even know what else. Now are you going to come quietly, or am I going to have to advise these poor women to take shelter?”

I got up from the table, took off my hat, and gave a big sweeping bow. “Ladies,” I said, and let him cuff me and walk me out.

“ _Thank_ you,” I muttered at him as we got onto the porch. “Fucking _Dale_. He didn't tell me we had to _talk._ ”

Mitchell snorted. Then he steered me between Doc and Kitty's and the gift shop next door and sprang the cuffs. There's a pair of cellar doors near the front of the gift shop that I always thought were ornamental, but it turns out they really do lead somewhere. The room underneath was empty except for a bunch of shelves, but it was cool, and more importantly it was away from the housewarming party.

“We should do that again,” I told him. “Just kind of lure Dale up here and stage the shootout at the O.K. Corral.”

“Hey, maybe you can get away with that, but he'd murder me if I dragged him all the way up here,” Mitchell commented. “Was kinda fun, though. Maybe we could put together a stagecoach robbery. Stage it a couple times a week. We've got all the parts.”

“ _Now_ you're talking. I wonder if he'd go for it.”

“Are you kidding me? Dale won't care. Until all the shit went down with Leah we all kind of assumed Dale didn't care about _anything._ He likes to make himself out to be the nastiest bastard on the face of the planet.”

“That's hilarious. He made me watch Million Dollar Baby and cried through most of it.” I chugged half my flask in one go. It's weird, even when you're out of the heat it makes you thirstier. “If he pulls it off that well, _he_ should be an actor. Make him chase the damn Sugar Plum Fairy.”

We stayed in the cellar for about fifteen minutes—basically long enough for the girls in the saloon to get distracted by something else—and Mitchell and I put together a beefier backstory for me. I'm an outlaw now, or at least, I can be if I need to be. Most of the rest of the time I'm just your typical ne'er-do-well who blows into town, works for somebody for a few months, and then blows out again. Not lazy, not criminal, but not ambitious or well-heeled, either. Then Mitchell headed back to Jack's Place, and I texted Dale to let him know I needed to relocate, and why.

He thought me getting arrested for breach of promise was _hilarious._

Apparently it's an old-timey charge for getting engaged, knocking the girl up, and then running off.

Anyway, he sent me over to the leather shop, which is actually a gift shop, but there's an actual leathersmith who works there, which is pretty cool. The first time I worked here I was saving up for a pair of leather boots when, well, you know. They're expensive, but worth it. I figured even if there weren't too many people in yet—which was how the day seemed to be shaping up, the heat and it being a weekday conspiring to keep people away—I could always watch the smith. Her name's Charlie, and she was Dale's first hire, although he wasn't in charge of the park at the time. He was sixteen and still working in the horror arcade, and found her at a local street fair selling her work on his day off. He picked up a leather bicycle seat and then pestered Rick until he offered her a job. Rick wasn't a fan of hiring a butch lesbian leatherworker because he thought she'd show up dressed like the Folsom Street Fair or something, but Dale sweet-talked him into it, and now she's the longest-lived employee in the whole park. I'd seen her since I got on the coach, but it'd still been a few years, and hanging out there would at least let me say hi.

I did, and got to spend an hour watching her stitch a belt, but the whole time I kept having this weird feeling about that room Mitchell took me to. I was sure I knew everything about Twin Vale. Even Dale said it: I know Twin Vale better than anyone else here. I would have sworn the area under those doors was just a concrete slab. I never even saw Warin come out of there.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to go back in there. It's got to beat Doc and Kitty's, right?


	13. I'm An Urban Explorer

There's an entire park inside the park.

Sorry, this is one of the most terrifying things that's ever happened to me. Also one of the coolest, but predominantly terrifying right now.

I sat on the weird new cellar in Twin Vale for a few days, and then decided to talk to Oliver about it. Of everyone in the park, he's second only to Leah in just kind of rolling with whatever the hell happened to me. It might sound weird, but there's something kind of nice about being able to actually joke about it instead of tiptoeing around everyone.

Also, he's got what people these days are apparently calling an “absolutely banging” taste in movies.I'm not criticizing anyone here, I'm just saying ten years ago we would have said his movie collection was the shit, and banging was a verb _definitely_ not related to whether or not something was great.

Anyway, when I told him about the cellar his biggest surprise was that it wasn't connected to anything else. At least, not that I know of. I haven't been back down there yet.

“You didn't know about the hidden park?”

Which, speaking as someone who once thought about swimming to Discovery Park on a family vacation and only chickened out because the water was too cold, is about the most awesome thing anyone could ever say to me.

The heat was bad enough today that we were taken offstage entirely from two to four, so I literally got paid for Oliver to take me through Hollywood the back way. This involved a ton of doors hidden with mirrors and poster panels and all kinds of other stuff. Most of the space we were passing through was completely empty, which is weird—I've never seen anywhere in the park just _empty._ Even otherwise-unused areas will be full of storage or something.

“So what's the story behind all the dead space?”

Oliver shook his head at me. “The chick who did this job before me showed me around, but she didn't know all that much. I know the space under the photo booth was originally planned to be the breakroom, but they changed it for some reason. And there's a room at the back of Casablanca I'm pretty sure was a movie theater, but like, _years_ ago. I, uh. Might've pretended to leave one night and gone exploring, instead. Appreciate if you didn't tell Dale that.”

Dale's probably just a little lucky Oliver's straight, if I'm going to be totally honest. He's cool enough I don't think I'd try my luck because he's fun to hang with, but I might, if I had enough to drink.

And I definitely didn't find out he was straight by asking Leah, you know, for a friend.

Something about there being an abandoned movie theater in Hollywood didn't strike me as right, so I asked if we could check it out, and seriously, I want to know who _built_ this place. The door to the theater is totally invisible from the outside—set hard against the corner of the back of the building, and with the door seam so perfectly camouflaged in the concrete that I leaned right against it before Oliver pushed it open and I never saw it. The inside was pitch black, not just dark but _painted_ dark, but you could hear how big it was. There were no echoes, probably acoustic panels or something, but our voices still had to travel before getting eaten.

“So just how much of this place have you seen?”

“Not much. My flashlight was dying and call me crazy, but I had this feeling if the door shut with me in here I'd never get out again.”

“Oh, that's comforting.” I turned on my phone light and looked for the corners first. “Hey, you're right. Look. The far wall's white, to project on. And there's a projector booth.”

“Wonder if anything's still in it.”

“One way to find out.” I headed for the ladder in the corner, wondering why there wasn't a staircase. Maybe it was to save space, but it seemed like a really weird setup. “You know, I have to tell you, I've always wanted to be one of those people who like, travels to abandoned places and stuff for fun just to take pictures. My inner fifteen-year-old is losing his _mind_ right now.”

“You know what's even better? We're getting paid for this.”

I found the door to the projector booth and kind of frowned at it. The only way in was literally to swing the door outward while holding onto the ladder with one hand, and then crawl into the booth. I couldn't see any sign of an old platform or handles or anything that might've been removed, either.

I finally got in, but there was a minute I thought I wouldn't. At least, I thought, there was a light switch.

Which turned on absolutely nothing when I flicked it, so I was back to using my phone light.

“There's a reel-to-reel in here!”

“Holy shit, seriously?” I couldn't see Oliver, but I could tell he was staring up at the booth. He kind of had that tone in his voice.

“Yeah. Still loaded and everything. This is weird, Oliver. Dale's into this kind of stuff, these are _expensive._ Why would somebody leave it here?”

“Y'know, I've always gotten the impression the manager before Dale's dad wasn't exactly all there in the head. Maybe he forgot it.”

“Maybe.” I shined my phone around the booth. “This is weird. Reel-to-reels usually come in two-part setups with a rewind machine. There's just the one machine and one reel. No rewind, no second projector, nothing. One reel isn't enough for a movie. And it doesn't look like anything was ever moved out of here.” I stuck my head out the projector window. “And honestly, Oliver, if Dale knew this was here, I don't think it'd still be aband—Jesus _Christ!_ ”

Dale probably knows how to operate a reel-to-reel. We had a DVD/VCR combo when we lived together, and I've seen him take three destroyed copies of the same movie and splice them into a single working copy with scotch tape and an exacto knife. For fun.

I, on the other hand, welcomed DVDs as my savior from having to fix the tracking, and never looked back. I couldn't fix a VCR if you paid me. And I definitely couldn't operate a reel-to-reel.

For that matter, I wasn't even touching it when it turned on.

I fell backward on my ass and landed hand-first in something sticky but _thick,_ like tar, all the way up to my wrist. Oliver started screaming at me to shut it down, and I started flicking every switch I could reach from my knees before I realized the damned thing wasn't even plugged in. I thought maybe I could push it over, but it was bolted down, so instead I bailed for the ladder.

Something reached out the projector room door and slammed it shut when I was halfway down.Oliver was down near the white wall, banging on the corner and apparently trying to open a door that wasn't there. I grabbed his hand and dragged him back up to the door we came in through. I couldn't get it open, and then I realized there was a normal handle from the inside instead of just pushing like we'd done when we came in.

We finally stopped running when we hit Ocean Boulevard. Ocean, like Second Street, is an employees-only road, and well out of the sight of parkgoers.

Oliver just kind of stared at my hand. I looked down and realized it was covered in some kind of brownish-blackish-greenish . . . _stuff,_ and pulled my hand up to smell it before making a face.

“Rotten. Ugh. Is there a bathroom in your breakroom?”

“Yeah.” He held the door open for me, and I washed my hands twice before asking the question I'm pretty sure both of us were thinking.

“What the _fuck_ was that?”

“Fucking weird, is what it was. Nathan, did you see the floor in there?”

“Gross?”

“I think I saw a body. When you turned the projector on. Down by the front wall."

“I didn't turn it on. It wasn't even plugged in. And even if it was, there's no power to that part of the building. I tried the lights and nothing worked.”

He just stared at me. “Then did you see the movie?”

“No?”

“Do you ever read creepypastas?”

“Used to love them, until my life turned into one.”

“It was like something out of one of those fucking, I don't know, lost episode ones, or something. I'm gonna have nightmares. Nathan, we've gotta tell Dale. If somebody's actually dead in there—”

“Weird question, Oliver, are you sure it was a human being?”

His mouth fell open. He didn't answer me. I told him about the thing I didn't see in the projector room. He considered, then shook his head.

"I don't think it was anything like that. I saw legs. And hair. Blonde. For a second I thought it _was_ Dale. Can't be, though, it was too skinny."

I checked my phone, sure we were going to end up late back onstage.

We were only in there for ten minutes. It felt like years. I know time works differently in the Underground and stuff, but I'm pretty sure we were still in our own place, this plane or dimension or whatever you want to call it—we were just that scared. I suggested to Oliver we head into Casablanca and place a specific order. He thought I was nuts when I came back with milk, bread, and a fruit and cheese plate and put them right outside the hidden movie theater door, but I'm not fucking around with whatever's in there.

I told Oliver to wait a day before telling Dale, but honestly, I don't know if I want to tell him at all. I have this bad feeling about anyone going back in there, and I'm wondering if I should nix my plans to go back in the cellar in Twin Vale. A lot of the places we walked through today just seemed abandoned or forgotten—which is creepy in its own way, but it's _normal_ creepy, _totally-of-this-physical-world_ creepy—but that theater didn't have that feeling. I felt watched.

The question to me now is, does whatever's in there have to do with the Wild Ones?

Did Oliver actually find a body?

And just how much do I need to worry about it?


	14. I'm Panicking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes a content warning for panic attacks, body horror, and racially-motivated threats of violence.

_Fuck._

I should elaborate, that's . . . no, that about sums it up.

Honestly, I'm kind of lucky today was Darius' birthday, or I might've been sleeping a lot heavier and missed it altogether and then things would be even worse, but they've gotten pretty bad.

The heat wave has finally subsided, but it's still pretty hot, so we asked Dale if we could stay in the park until midnight to celebrate instead of doing cake in the morning. Not only did he say yes, he told us if one of the bartenders was willing to stay we could have drinks in Casablanca or Doc and Kitty's. We passed a hat, put together a couple hours' wages and some tip money, and got Jessie to stay. She's one of the Twin Vale bartenders, and when I approached her around six to ask if she'd stay she put aside some entrees to cut up into snacks, too.

It was a pretty great party, and when we were done we cleared up the dining room for Jessie so all she had to do was load our plates and glasses into the dishwasher. We said our goodnights and headed home. There was a thunderstorm brewing, but not yet broken. So far, so normal.

I woke up around two to noise coming out of Leah's bedroom. If you've ever heard a little kid having a nightmare, you know about what this was like. I got up and headed over to see if she was okay and saw her sitting on the side of the mattress, rocking back and forth with her arms around herself.

“Leah? You okay?”

She gave me this absolutely terrible smile. “Yeah, I've had period cramps worse than this. I'll be okay.” And then she let out this really awful gasp and leaned forward, panting, and I saw her shirt stick to her chest before she gave me this look like an animal caught in a trap. “Maybe not.”

I thought she might just be sweating, or possibly she got food poisoning, but when I got eye-to-eye with her I could see her collarbones over her tank top, and that idea went out the window fast.

“ _Fuck._ Leah, we have to get you to the park.”

She looked scared. Terrified, even. “The park?”

“It's starting. I'm so sorry. Shit. Come on. We've gotta go.”

The elevator in Leah's building works, but it's incredibly slow and she only lives on the second floor, so I usually take the stairs. Today I wish I'd waited for the stupid thing—we got three stairs down and her legs went out from under her. We made it to the bottom, but it was like trying to walk with a jellyfish, and when we got to the car I had to buckle her in.

I called Dale as soon as I hit a straightaway. He sounded like he was only just coming awake.

“We need to get into the park. Now. We're on our way.”

“The hell . . . ? Nate, are you drunk?”

“I need to get Leah into the park,” I said again, and took a look over at her while we sat at a red light. She was mostly curled into a ball around the seatbelt and crying a little. “But we need your keys.”

“You want me to drag my ass down there at--what time is it--two-thirty in the morning? Whatever you left there after your party, Nate, it can wait until morning.”

“She's fucking dying, Dale, if you're going to do this again I'll find a way to climb the fucking gates myself.” It occurred to me in some part of my brain still trying to stay calm, I don't think Dale's ever seen me pissed before. Not in any meaningful capacity, anyway, there's a big difference between getting pissy with yourself for dropping a dish and actually being ready to strangle your ex. And of course he didn't have Leah in front of him, but I didn't really care.

He was silent. I just shook my head. “You know what? Forget it.” I tossed my phone in the backseat. I heard it start ringing again, but ignored it. The entire last half of the drive is down a strip of highway that doesn't have streetlights because the park is the only thing out that way, and the town packs up early enough I figured I could floor it at this hour and not worry about cops.

And I did, trying to think about what Leah might have in the trunk that I could use to get over the wall into the park, but somehow Dale still beat us there. I pulled in and skidded to a stop by the gates, and saw him do the same. Leah sat up, but at this point her entire shirt was sticking to her and she was so pale she looked white. I wasn't actually totally sure she was fully conscious, either. She looked like she had no idea where she was.

I got out of the car and ran to Leah's side. She still couldn't unbuckle herself, and when I tried to help her out she went splaylegged on the ground again. I swore and tried to pull her up, and then Dale leaned down next to me and scooped her up.

“Come on. Fuck. Okay. Shh. It's okay. It's okay. I've got you. Let's go.” He swung his hip at me. “Keyring. Grab it.”

I pulled his park keys out of his pocket by the lanyard and ran for the gates. The keys have changed since I used to ride in mornings with him, and I spent way too long trying to find the right one, but the gate finally swung open, and Dale jogged past me with Leah in his arms.

He laid her down on the bench under the willow by the entrance and pushed her hair out of her face. She whimpered.

“She's breathing. Nate, what the fuck _is_ this?”

I shook my head at him and tugged off her pajama top before the seepage from the blisters could stick it to open wounds.

“Christ.” Dale tugged the park keys out of my hand and headed for his office. He wasn't exactly jogging anymore, but he wasn't going slow, either, and it didn't take him long to come back out with a water jug and a first aid kit. Leah was still in that kind of soupy not-really-awake state, but she wasn't making that awful crying noise anymore and her breathing was getting more regular, which I took to be a good sign. Dale stopped at the bench and lifted her head so he could sit down.

“Here, pull her up, I'll clean her back.”

I did, letting her rest her cheek on my shoulder, and Dale swore.

“Her tattoos are gone. Totally gone. What the _fuck—_ ”

“I read about that in her blog. They started bleeding out because there's iron in tattoo ink. She lost all the linework.”

“She lost _everything,_ ” he said. “There's nothing here. Except blisters. Jesus.”

He started dabbing at her back with the water and a pack of paper towels. The light under the tree wasn't great—just a single streetlamp, and the willow is trimmed short enough you can see the bench from outside but it's still a weeping willow—but it was enough I could see red and yellow in the fluid he was washing away. I just pet her hair and kept babbling the kind of nonsense you say to a hurt little kid, like _shhh_ and _it's okay_ even though, very obviously, it was _not_ even a little bit okay.

“This is going to sting like a bitch, sorry,” I heard Dale say, and then I heard a kind of little plasticky click and Leah made a hurt noise and more or less tried to crawl into my chest.

“Dale, you're fucking _hurting_ her—”

“I'm not letting this get infected.” I looked up to snipe at him and saw a bottle of rubbing alcohol in his hand. “Almost over. Shh. Okay, baby girl. It's okay. You're okay. I don't have anything that's going to cover this, I've just got bandaids.”

“Anything you put on'd just stick anyway. Switch me?”

He nodded, and I held Leah up by the shoulders while Dale scooted out and took my place before I sat down behind her and leaned her against me again, and he went to work cleaning her front.

“Boy,” she said, and her voice was weak and broken but still loud enough in the otherwise-silent park to make us both jump, “if you asked me to imagine being topless with a pair of guys this is _not_ how it'd go.”

Dale let out a grim laugh and went back to his swabbing before pulling out the alcohol again. “Last time. Longest thirty seconds of your life and it's over, promise. I'll be quick.

Leah nodded, but she still tried to squirm away from the alcohol, and when I grabbed her hand she squeezed so hard I found out later she left bruises. I can't blame her. I've had those burns. Getting them cleaned is probably better than leaving them dirty, but I can't imagine having to actually put antiseptic on them.

There was another plasticky snap—Dale closing the bottle. Leah shivered, and I pulled off my tee and slipped it over her head. I heard Dale gasp and realized he probably had no idea what happened to me on the coach, but between my scars and Leah's blisters he could figure it out pretty easily.

“We're going to have to find a place she can go. She can't just sleep on a bench. It's exposed and any minute now the rain's going to start.” He looked toward his office. "I don't think I have anything worth sleeping on in there."

“I can stay with Mr. Scratch, it's okay.”

“I'm not putting you in a cage.” Dale actually sounded angry. I remembered something from Leah's blog, him telling her not to think of the pretenders as human. Times have certainly changed and challenged, if your name is Dale and you run a cursed amusement park. “There used to be a living room hidden in Candyland, but fucked if I remember where.”

“I can stay in the maintenance shed for the night to keep out of the rain.” Leah sounded like some kind of Victorian heroine recovering from fever. “Where they keep the hay for Mr. Scratch. I used to do that with a friend when I was a kid, we'd sleep in the barn.”

Dale looked at me like he was asking a question. I nodded.

“There's some ponchos and stuff in the Twin Vale costume room. We can put something down so she's got blankets. Kind of.”

Dale nodded and passed me his keys again. “You go to Twin Vale. I'll take her over to horror. There's a flashlight in my desk. Top left drawer. It's one of those giant industrial ones, you can't miss it.”

I nodded back at him and watched him scoop her off the bench, cradling her against him. She curled up against his chest, bare legs dangling over his arm, and I wished she'd picked a full pair of pajama bottoms before bed instead of underwear. I don't know that I can put it into words, but there was something really awful about seeing her that way without even the protection of clothes. Not that pajama bottoms would have protected her from what was happening to her, but it was still worse, somehow. Dale adjusted his grip to get an arm around her without hitting the worst of the blisters, and turned toward horror.

I grabbed the flashlight and headed for Twin Vale. There are streetlamps there—old-timey ones that look like the ones that needed lamplighters, they flicker and everything—but they're on a timer. There's no reason to have them on once staff is gone, so they shut off at midnight.

By the time I got up to Twin Vale, the rain was finally coming down—just a few drops at a time, those fat warm drops that look dime-sized on the sidewalk and feel like tiny bursts of shock cutting through the humidity haze.

And then all hell broke loose, and between Leah and Twin Vale I'm starting to wonder if I'm losing my mind.

I've told you before what Twin Vale looks like. Literally the only way to get lost in it is to walk down the wrong street, and then you just turn around and head back to the plaza. That's it. I thought I could find my way around in my sleep, and Second is literally in a straight line from the entrance—walk in, walk down Main, there's Second—but I was wrong, apparently, because I got completely turned around. The third time I walked into the main plaza, I started to freak out a little, especially because the rain was going from fat to driving. I was sure I hadn't actually turned anywhere. Straight shot, no reason to do anything but go forward. I ran through the plaza, feeling like I must be wasting far too much time, and found myself down by Jack's. Turned around, and the leathersmith shop was right behind me even though it's actually on First. I ran back toward it, sure I'd end up in the plaza again, and instead I ended up by the little cluster of kids' rides on the far end of Union without ever going through the plaza.

I decided to just run out to Gold and take it around, but when I got to the end of Union I was in the plaza again, and at that point I said fuck it—Doc and Kitty's has a little stash of table linens for people getting married and stuff, and it had to be at least as good as a poncho. If I kept running in circles I'd still be going at sunup and I'd be carrying things back to Leah in a downpour.

So I turned toward it, and saw myself hanging from the end of the porch.

You can probably understand why I screamed.

I dropped the flashlight. It went out. Lightning flashed, and instead of me on the porch I saw Warin, hanging from the same noose and giving me that shitty dripping-black ask-if-I-care grin while I backed away so fast I fell on my ass. I got my feet again and kept going. Someone grabbed my shoulder. I turned around—nothing there. I took off running again and felt someone slap my hip, but when I tried to knock them aside I just hit air. I tripped over a barrel outside one of the shops and fell and felt someone, maybe the same someone, take an iron grip on my wrist. My glasses went flying.

And then I heard Dale shouting my name and he picked me up.

“What happened?”

I tried to explain, but I couldn't make actual sentences work. I finally just spit out “ _him_ ” to try and get the point across and waved behind me at Doc and Kitty's. There are some things you just don't want to see.

“Doc and Kitty's?”

“The _body_ , Dale, the _body,_ they _brought him—_ ”

“Nate, there's nothing there.”

I didn't want to look, but I had to.

The porch was kind of blurry without my glasses, but he was right. The only thing on it was the same old rocking chair and barrel setup as always.

“Did you get the ponchos?”

Somehow, I managed to explain that no, I'd spent the last who knew how long running in circles. Dale frowned at me in the light from his phone.

“Let's go grab them and get out of here. You're panicking.” He did a quick scan of the ground and found my glasses.

“I just saw Warin in a _noose_ , Dale, he—”

He kind of made this shushing noise as soon as I said the name.

“Look, this is the first time you've been here in the dark since you've been out and it's a hell of a night. But you're _extremely_ wigged out and I think your brain took whatever you actually saw and turned it into nightmare fuel for you. Let's just get you out of here, okay?"

“Dale, _I saw him._ And me. He was me. Before he was him he was me.”

“Okay,” he said, but I could tell he was humoring me. “I'll talk to Madeleine tomorrow and see if I can figure out what happened. Let's just get what we need and get back to Leah. There's two of us now, nobody's going after you.”

“I lost your flashlight.”

“It's okay.” He flipped his phone as we headed down Main. Totally normal, not in circles, only one plaza Main.

“Leah,” I heard him say. I was only half paying attention, though—I kept looking in windows and doorways and not being sure if it was better or worse to see nothing there. “Yeah, he's okay. He had a panic attack. I should've sent him with you in the first place. You okay? Good. Drink some more water. We'll see you in a few minutes.”

“How'd you know?” I almost panicked again over the keys before remembering I'd dropped the lanyard over my neck when I started running. I unlocked the costume shop and flipped on the light. I've never been so grateful for electricity in my life.

“Nate, I'm pretty sure people three counties over know. You've got a hell of a yell on you when you're scared.”

We scavenged two ponchos and one of those long gunslinger duster-type things, and after we locked the door again Dale took the keys and steered us behind the building. There are a couple of maintenance golf carts in the park, and there's usually one in Twin Vale because of the size of the place. I told him what I thought about the tablecloths in Doc and Kitty's, and he nodded.

“Let's pick one up in horror.”

The ones in horror were black instead of white, but it sounded like a fine idea to me. Dale layered up three of them to lay down over the loose hay to keep it from scratching and tucked the ends under a bale before he picked Leah up from the bigger stack of bales and laid her down on top of the tablecloths. Her eyes fluttered shut, then open again, and he pulled a poncho over her.

"You good?"

"Yes. Thank you."

He leaned over and kissed her cheek. "We'll bring you clean clothes tomorrow morning and find you somewhere a hell of a lot better than this. Just try to rest for now."

She nodded at him. I grabbed the other poncho and tossed it down next to her. She gave me a puzzled look.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm not making you stay here alone, are you crazy?”

“Go home, Nathan.” I opened my mouth and she waved a hand to stop me. “I've got Mr. Scratch. I'll be okay. Go home.” She smiled, and I could tell as bad as my night was, hers was worse. She looked exhausted. “I appreciate the offer, but no.”

I wanted to argue, but finally I just kissed her forehead and did what I could to tuck her in. She was back out before we even closed the shed. Dale grabbed a cinderblock from outside and eased it back into the shed behind the door so he could leave it cracked without the door blowing open in the rain to give Leah some air and what might pass as a nightlight--the streetlamps go out, but the light on the front of the maintenance shed doesn't. Then he took a box of nails from the far end of the maintenance shed and set them down on top of the cinderblock: iron. I wondered a little if he thought about Deanna when he kissed Leah goodnight. Deanna was his sister, once upon a time. The key word in that sentence is "was."

“I'm sorry,” he said, as we headed back for the entrance. “I didn't know. I would've been here with the gates already open if I had. Jesus."

I just kind of nodded at him. Adrenaline crash is a hell of a drug. He locked the gate again.

“Do you need somewhere to go?”

“I've got Leah's key.”

“That isn't what I meant, and you know it.”

I thought about it for a second—as best I could, anyway, if that's what panic attacks feel like I never want another one—and nodded.

“Okay. Come on.”

He helped me into the truck and got me settled with the truck blanket around my shoulders before taking Leah's keys and moving the car into a more unobtrusive—and actually properly-parked—spot. He came back and gave me the keys and my phone.

I haven't actually been back in our apartment since I left the park, and today I've mostly just stayed in the kitchen, but last night I literally only got around by muscle memory. I couldn't have told you what was different and what was the same if you paid me. Dale sat me down at the table and gave me a bottle of water and some ibuprofen, and then he dug out a tee-shirt for me--Leah was sleeping in mine a few miles away, and my pajama bottoms got destroyed in Twin Vale. Dale doesn't really bother with nightclothes, but he's big enough I could probably throw a belt around my waist and call one of his shirts a dress, so it's good enough to sleep in.

Dale waited outside the bathroom for me to change. Then he picked me up and carried me to bed. I could've walked, but I'm pretty sure he could tell I wasn't exactly with it. Being touched helps, sometimes, when your mind is trying to float off with you like that.

He tucked me in, and then laid down next to me and hooked his leg behind my knees, like he was hugging me with his arms and legs both. It sounds kind of sexual when I put it that way, and there was a time it would have been, but it wasn't last night--last night it was like he had this idea he could help if he could just figure out how to hold me close enough. And it did help, actually. Maybe it was Dale's weight on the mattress, maybe it was being able to smell the sheets even in my sleep and know I wasn't back on the fucking stagecoach, but I actually made it through the night without waking up. I don't think I even dreamed.

I actually didn't wake up until Dale was already gone. He left me a note on the kitchen table with Leah's keys that he was considering me called out sick, and said if I needed to get anywhere he'd get me a cab, and that I should call when I woke up to check in.

I did, and found out Dale'd called the rest of the crew early in the morning to make sure Leah had clean clothes and breakfast. He was at some furniture place when I called, looking for a decent futon. He'd had the idea, he said, that keeping things as normal as we can for as long as we can might help slow things down.

“Did she get a shower?”

“She didn't think she could handle a shower when I called her this morning, but I took her some more water to wash with. And soap.” He paused. “I should've done all this ten years ago.”

“At least you're doing it now.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He paused again. “I went down to Twin Vale this morning with Gary. We covered the whole porch at Doc and Kitty's. I don't know what you saw last night, but there are no hooks anyone could actually hang the weight of a body from. Hell, there aren't even any extra nails. Or holes where something might've been taken out. I haven't talked to Madeleine yet, but if there was something there, it wasn't physical. Not the way you and I would normally use that word.”

“Okay.” The body looked pretty damn deadweight to me, but I was also losing my mind, and for all I know Warin can levitate and go as limp as he wants. “I'm going to stay here for awhile today. If that's okay.”

“It's your place too. Even if you're not sure you want to keep it yet.”

“Thanks.”

So that's where we are today: the other actors are taking care of Leah in my absence, I've stress-cooked enough to fill Dale's freezer for a month, and I need to get one hell of a move on.

You know. Before it's too late.


	15. I'm A Historian

Well, I'm back to work.

I ended up staying an extra night at Dale's. I was going to ask if he could drop me at Leah's last night, but he'd still have had to pick me up in the morning, and he asked if I needed to go but also had that “I'm so exhausted if you say yes I'll cry” look.

Okay, and also if I'm going to be totally honest I didn't exactly want to go.

Really, if you want to understand Dale as a person, the last two days are the best way to do it. I slept alongside him in a bed we'd shared for two years without him ever suggesting I owed or might even want more, but when I woke up at three in the morning with nightmares he was up almost before I was, and he didn't stop holding me until I stopped crying.

And then he brought me a warm washcloth and a glass of water, because giving people things to drink is Dale's way of handling everything.

I nixed the water, but I let him wash my face. And then we went back to sleep.

If you don't get why I'm torn between wanting to tell him to fuck off and wanting to tell him to fuck me at this point, I can't help you.

We stopped by Leah's this morning so I could change out of Dale's pajamas and pick up some stuff for Leah, and water her spider plant. It was starting to put out baby plants, so I pinched one off and put it in water to take her.

I made some pancake batter and threw it in a pan while I put in my contacts and went hunting for some stuff for her, too. It was Bisquick instead of from scratch, but it had to be better than yesterday's funnel cakes. The park doesn't open until noon, so there's no breakfast to be had on the grounds.

I tossed two bags and a box in the back of the truck before hauling myself back in: two books, as many half-decent prepackaged snacks as I could find, clothes, Leah's laptop. Her pillow. The zip-up sweatshirt she left perpetually tossed on the end of the couch for convenience's sake. You know, the kind of stuff you start missing, when you're away from home.

We pulled up outside the gates at the same time as Gary. Dale tipped him a terse salute and looked over at me. Ten years ago, this is the part where we'd kiss goodbye before putting aside the boyfriend business to go do the work business. This time he just took in a breath like he was going to say something, let it out, and said “Leah's in Candyand” before getting out and unlocking the truck bed.

“You find that living room thing you were talking about?”

“Yeah. Some of the other actors turned it into a studio for her.” He paused. “And the Diva, apparently. She showed up, gave Leah a champagne glass, and left. Not sure I like what that suggests.”

“Welcome wagon for the new arrival?”

“Something like that.” Dale hoisted the box into his arms. I grabbed the bags and swung the bed shut with my hip.

Candyland is nowhere near as easy to navigate as the other three sections. The main road goes in a kind of lumpy circle, there are all kinds of little side-roads where the rides are, and right in the middle of it is a fairytale plaza with another couple of random roads going through it—Jack and the Beanstalk, Hansel and Gretel, those ones. There's a castle at the far end of it—a little one, with a combination gift shop and restaurant inside, of course called King Arthur's Court—and as we headed toward it I looked up at its main window and felt a chill.

I never noticed it before, but the story on the stained-glass window is the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and the window was open.

I guess I should've guessed the hidden living room would be on the other side of it.

When I was a waiter here, I subbed in King Arthur's a couple times. I've always known it to be a two-story building—the gift shop and most of the public restaurant seating downstairs, birthday parties upstairs. Turns out, if you go into the gift shop and go behind the counter, there's a doorway that's hidden completely by forced perspective on one side and a display on the other, and it leads straight to a staircase—right up to a _third_ floor. Dale grabbed a horseshoe off the floor at the top of the staircase as we passed. There isn't just a living room up there, either—there's a bathroom and, something I found out when he opened the door and slid the horseshoe inside, an old radio broadcasting studio.

“Dale . . . ?”

"She can get out if she has to and nobody's come yet. It'd hurt until she was past it, but she can get out. It's just certain other parties can't get _in._ "

Fair enough. And probably smart. "That was a microphone?"

“There was a deejay here in the sixties and seventies. The transmission tower's in the castle spire. They used to play nursery rhymes and stuff. Every hour on the hour he'd give the time and every hour on the half he'd give Candyland news about the old actors, giving you hints where you could find them. You know, Little Red Riding Hood was spotted, that kind of thing. When my dad took over the park he cut it.”

“And the studio was never dismantled?”

“Nope.” Dale knocked on a door on the right side of the hall, then opened it softly when there was no answer.

The room Leah's in right now is a hell of a lot better than a maintenance shed in horror. There's the window—which is creepy if you stop to think about it, but from the inside the light coming in is pretty, too—with one of those little mini Zen stone water fountains in it, and a sofa. The coffee table got repurposed into a nightstand, with a lamp and a phone charger and everything. Dale's small file cabinet was sitting in the corner with a microwave on top of it. Dale got her a futon and some bedding, and she'd made herself right at home in it. She was still out like a light. Dale set down the box of snacks and pulled down the neck of her tee-shirt enough to see what was underneath, and then nodded at it before kind of jerking his head to motion me out of the room. I set down the bags on the coffee table and followed him out.

“Anne and I cleaned her up again yesterday after I got the futon in, but she still looked pretty bad. Looks like everything's finally scabbing over now she's got the chance to actually rest.”

“You'll be amazed how fast it'll heal over. Until she tries to leave again, anyway.”

I was pretty sure Dale was going to say something, but he didn't. He knew exactly how I knew what I was talking about. I gave him a minute to make up his mind before I nodded up at the window.

“So given how this place was founded . . . why the _hell_ would anybody want the Pied Piper in here?”

“It was dictated by upper management.” Dale nodded toward the outdoor seating, and I took it. It's almost July, but in the morning it's still pretty nice. “It's a true story, you know. The Pied Piper. The rats came later, but in 1284 a piper really did come to Hamelin and really did take the children away. Or something like a piper, anyway. There was a window put up in the local church sixteen years later to commemorate it. Scholars have been trying to figure out for years what actually happened.”

“But you know.”

“Yeah. I know.” Dale looked glum.

“Am I allowed to know? Just, you know, curiosity's sake?”

“Probably nothing you can't guess yourself. Upper management calls them “the old-worlders,” but it's the same group. The original deal had nothing to do with rats. There was a famine. The old-worlders made a deal with the town: here's a bit of our land up on a hill, plant it for us with wheat and fruit, harvest it and make us bread, we'll make sure your crops grow but don't take a single bite of ours.”

“And the kids ate the fruit.”

“Told you there wasn't anything about this story you couldn't guess. Of course, in 1284 saying you made a deal with the fair folk was a great way to get the Pope to send people to raze your entire village, so they made up some bullshit about a mysterious piper instead of a faerie parade.” He gave me this look so somber you'd think somebody'd died. “A friendly little reminder of what we stand to lose. According to Oliver, the two of you found another nice metaphorical _don't fuck up_ post-it note. Don't look at me that way. He panicked when he found out about Leah and asked if the two of you pissing around where you had no business being could've caused this.”

“Could it?”

Dale shook his head. “Doubtful. You know what that place was, though, right?”

“A movie theatre.”

“Yes.” Dale suddenly squeezed his eyes shut and slapped himself. I dropped my coffee and grabbed his arm. He opened his eyes and stared down at his hand, then pinched his nose. My coffee was a total loss, but the breeze was light enough I still had my napkin, and I pushed it into his hand. He finagled it around his nose to help with the sudden unexpected appearance of a nosebleed in his morning.

“Them?”

“Them,” he confirmed, voice muffled by his hand. “Speaking of places you're not supposed to go—”

“Dale, _don't—_ ”

He waved a hand at me. “Remember you asked when St. Macabre's went in?”

“Yeah, but—”

“I found a bunch of old blueprints from the park development. I know you're into that shit. Thought you might like a look, as long as you don't go running into half-rotten abandoned areas. Consider it payback for filling my fridge.” He pulled the napkin away from his nose, examined it, dabbed at his nose, nodded, and threw the napkin out before standing up.

I was going to protest again when it hit me: half-rotten. To the average ear, just a descriptor.

But to somebody who knows the park's maintenance just a little bit . . . . anything routinely maintained wouldn't be rotten at all. And anything totally abandoned for so long it'd vanished from view would be more than half-rotten.

_I see what you did there._

Hopefully no other significant parties did, though.

“I will, thanks.”

I had three hours before call, so I took the file Dale gave me and headed back to the outdoor tables in Candyland to flip through it. Some of the papers were so old they were yellow; some of the others had clearly fallen apart years prior and been recently restored. I looked at the carefully-cut and sealed lines of tape and knew exactly who'd done the restoration. I know Dale's work when I see it.

He was right: even without knowing if anything in these pages was of interest to Leah's cause, it was cool to look at just to see how the place had grown and changed. I flicked through invoices and scale maps, some of them so big they'd take up the entire table when unfolded, and then paused on one labeled _1999 Expansion Project 11/99._

Most of it was blocked out in Dale's dad's handwriting—I'd seen it on enough greeting cards and letters and old park paperwork to know. But one structure wasn't: a building in the horror section, readily identifiable 20 years later as St. Macabre's. But Rick had originally labeled it as _Holmes House,_ only for his label to be aggressively scratched out and replaced with a single word in jagged letters: _**her.**_

Laila's hiring documents were right behind it.

October of 1999.

I just stared down at the papers for a minute. Her resume said she'd just graduated college with a degree in marine biology. She'd included a headshot—something all the actors needed, to make sure they fit the character profile—and it didn't take somebody interested in girls to know she was drop-dead gorgeous. Rick's writing covered the resume, and near the bottom he'd written something startling: _Silent Hill/HH attendant?_

When we were in high school, Dale and I hung out with this group of four people who basically became friends with each other because nobody else would. One of them--Dale's girlfriend, actually--was a girl named Veronica. She went by Vinnie, and she was a hardcore gamer before that concept even really existed. Puzzle games, shooters, RPGs, she'd play anything. She used to joke she was going to have three kids: Riven, Gex, and Majora. And if you got her to open her mouth on whatever she was playing at the time, you'd never get her to shut up about the console wars and bad localization. Which I guess was fair enough, since I spent the exact same time period never shutting up about My Chemical Romance and being secretly, hopelessly in love with Gerard Way. 

I knew exactly what Rick meant by Silent Hill. I'd heard Vinnie talk about it, and I'm pretty sure Dale actually played it with her. I wondered if there were any pictures of Laila in costume before the change, and when I flipped behind the resume I found one.

It wasn't particularly good. Dale would've just been getting into photography at that point, and he didn't know anything yet about photo composition, so it was weirdly framed and the light was bad. But it wasn't blurry. She was standing behind the arcade with a cigarette between her fingers. And yes—if you knew what Rick's inspiration for the costume was it was absolutely clear, but more importantly—to me, at least—it was nearly identical to what the Nurse wears now. More cleavage, and with a sharp and angular mask instead of a broken jaw, but still easy to see how she'd gone from one to the other. And at some point she was planned to transition to a new character, but before she could, Warin happened, and whatever Holmes House was, it was turned into . . . .

_Turned into._

I flipped back by about seventy years and found the Hollywood plans. Sure enough, there it was, marked in the plain but elegant hand of whoever'd been in charge at that point . . . no, very specifically someone who'd marked their initials in the bottom right corner of the map as _R.L.M._

Robert. Robert oversaw this plan. Robert was the one who'd indicated a large building, just off the main plaza of Hollywood, as _Bijou Theatre._

It was Casablanca.

And also the abandoned theatre attached to it.

The door through which Oliver and I had entered was marked _employee and colored entrance_ , and I made a face at it before it hit me: it was a Jim Crow theatre. The back half was fitted with a whitewash screen and a single projector in a small booth, probably also run by a black employee. There might have been a reel rewind in there at some point, but they hadn't put in the expense for a multi-projector setup, not for the black audience. The front half, well, I'm pretty sure the outside of Casablanca is still 90% what was once the Bijou, and I doubt the white audience had a painted screen, let's put it that way.

I grabbed my legal pad and sketched out Casablanca—front of house, back of house, and bar. Then I added the abandoned section.

Then I put another piece of paper on top, outlined the building, marked off the projector booth in the Crow section and where the vaudeville stage must have been, and held both papers up to the sun.

_I knew it._

I told you before Dale's a film buff. If it has to do with cameras—either the still or motion kind—he's all over it. Which is how I know way, way too much about silent movies and the soundtracks provided to them by theatrical pianists.

It was guesswork. A lot of it. But if the modern-day kitchen was once part of the Crow theatre, and the modern-day wine storage and bar was the projector's booth and staircase for the whites-only theatre, then the Pianist's stand would fall right next to the wall of the Crow theatre, down by the screen, where a theatrical pianist would have sat. The modern-day raised seating section lined up perfectly with my estimate of a stage. And if the weird little dead-end kitchen hallway with the cash register was once a door between the two halves of the theatre . . .

No wonder the back half was abandoned. The beginning of integration probably gave them a good excuse to shut it down, but I doubt that was the real reason. I'd be willing to bet cash Robert was turned in the Crow theatre. Maybe Grace, too, come to think of it. They headed out one night through that back entrance, and Warin was waiting for them.

I rifled back through the pages so hard I almost tore them.

_Three years. She came to the park three years ago. Warin spotted her almost right away. Dale's added things and taken them out since I ended up on the stagecoach, but there hasn't been a major renovation project . . . ._

And then I spotted it, and almost threw up on the spot.

A blueprint of the horror section, in Dale's handwriting, marked just a couple of months after Leah's hire date. Part of the arcade was missing in the blueprint, and in its place was something labeled _Hallway to Hell._ Probably a working title, but it didn't really matter, because someone had scratched it out, and the same jagged hand from the 1999 blueprint had written over it:

_**Leah.** _


	16. I'm a Highwayman

Life's been pretty shitty lately.

So today was kind of a nice change.

I only ever worked one Fourth of July at the park, and my experience with it had literally been “the bartender needs somebody to open beers” because it was so busy. According to Oliver and Caroline, though, it was going to be just as wild outside. I was advised to fill my flask right before going onstage and stop often, and told I should try to get offstage every two hours, even for just five minutes, just to kind of let my brain catch up so I didn't hit a wall right in front of a group of kids. Leah asked me to bring sunscreen, and we spent ten minutes in her room smearing it everywhere we could reach. I even went up under her hairline around her ears, since her costume is hatless.

Oh.

There is one other thing I should tell you.

We'd had a staff meeting the night before. Just the actors, mostly going over what we could expect for the day, how to handle breaks, shutdown everywhere but Hollywood for the fireworks, that kind of stuff.

We also decided it was better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, at least where Dale is concerned.

Which is why at one o'clock, about an hour after park open, I hid Leah in the little cellar in Twin Vale with one of the doors open, and Oliver behind the false front on the leathersmith's, and parked myself on the porch at Doc and Kitty's, waiting for Mitchell and the horses to pull by.

As soon as he got to the leathersmith's, I let out the biggest _yee-hoo_ whoop I could and jumped off the porch. Leah darted out of the cellar, and from the roof of the leathersmith I heard three loud pops: the crackers in Oliver's popgun going off.

He slid down one of the front porch posts, and all three of us surrounded the stagecoach. Around us, a crowd of parkgoers was reaching for phones and cameras—they knew a show start when they saw one. There were no good girls' costumes in the Twin Vale costume shop where we found Oliver's poncho and gunbelt, but Maxine is part of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and she'd gotten Leah into a shift and corset and button-up boots with this long ruffled purple and red skirt that looked like it belonged on a Wild West brothel madam. So, you know, perfect.

“Hand over the reins, son,” I told Mitchell, and he did a decent job looking offended.

“What do you think you're doing?”

Leah stepped up. “Rumor has it there's a hundred thousand dollars in gold bullion in that coach, mister, straight from California back to Dodge to head east.”

“None of your business if there is or there isn't. Out of my way.” Mitchell picked up the horsewhip I'd never actually used or carried, like he was going to unlimber it, and Leah pulled out this ridiculous little revolver I'd actually found in a box of “Indian headdresses” that wouldn't have been considered okay even when I first ended up on the stagecoach.

“I say it _is_ our business, Mister Wells Fargo Man. Now why don't you do what the nice man said and hand it over?”

“This gold is the property of the United States Government, missy, now—”

Oliver's popgun let out another bang. I couldn't see him around the horses, but he'd demonstrated his I'm-a-black-hat grin this morning, and I could imagine it perfectly. Mitchell dropped the whip.

“Missed you on purpose, son, now I think you want to listen to Jane and Martin before I change my mind.”

Mitchell's gasp wasn't exactly Broadway quality, but he tried. “Martin Eastwood and Smiling Jane Hart?” He jerked his head back toward Oliver. “And Tannen Brown?”

I tipped my hat to him. “See you've heard of us. Now I'll say this one last time, you can hand over those reins, and there's a friendly Sioux campment near here we can drop you off in. Or Tannen there can change his mind, and there's some awfully hungry buzzards through here who'll be happier for it.”

Mitchell pulled out his own ridiculous revolver and aimed it at me. Leah pulled her trigger, and I had just enough time to hope I'd actually loaded the blanks right, or we were all going to look like a bunch of unarmed idiots. There was a loud bang, and Mitchell dropped his revolver--almost perfect timing, too.

“My hand!”

“You know, they say if I challenged Annie Oakley she'd lose,” Leah told him. “Last chance, mister."

Mitchell dropped the reins. The horses stamped, finally nervous.

And then it hit me, of the three of us in this last-minute Wild West gang, I was the only one who knew how to drive.

Well.

Too late to back out now.

So I swung on and beckoned Oliver up with me, trying to hide how hard I was shaking. “Tannen, tie his hands. Jane, you're the caboose on this merry train. You got enough bullets?”

“I could take the whole U.S. Cavalry, if they were dumb enough to try it.” Leah climbed onto the shotgun rail at the back, the place where any real Wells Fargo wagon would've had an armed guard hanging. “Let's go, Marty.”

I gave the horses a yell and we took off, people cheering and clapping behind us. I gave Oliver a grin over Mitchell's head. Mitchell snickered, then squeezed my knee—the kind of reassuring thing you'd normally do to somebody's shoulder, if, you know, you weren't supposed to be their prisoner, with your hands tied between your knees.

“We're gonna be in so much trouble.”

“Nah, Dale's gonna be pissed right up until he hears someone say it was the shit, and then he's going to _act_ like we're in trouble but we won't be.” I turned down Union—the shortest way to Gold and back off the damned coach—and then pulled up to Jack's Place.

“Forgot there was an actual hitching post here.” I threw the reins around it, and Mitchell stared up at me, mouth open.

“You can do that _without getting off?_ ”

“Um . . . yeah? That's why it's so high.” I jumped down and helped Leah off the back. You could tell she'd been laughing all the way to Jack's, hair falling out of the little Victorian roll Maxine'd put it in, skirt hitched up to keep it out of the wheels.

“That. Was. _Awesome._ ”

“ _Was_ it, now,” I heard Dale's voice say, and I kind of felt my heart sink a little. I was hoping to get Leah and Oliver out of the way before he found us. “Why the hell is it, whenever something happens around here, it's always you two?”

I turned around to defend the rest of my band of outlaws and immediately found myself faced with Dale, not the manager who hired me as an actor this year but the one who first told me he could get a job a decade ago: clean-shaven, buttoned shirt and neat jeans, decently-not-messy hair, and I kind of forgot what I meant to say. Which is probably why it's lucky I had a co-conspirator, honestly, because I don't think I could've gotten anything out if I'd tried.

“Okay, just being fair here, this was at least halfway my idea,” Mitchell protested. “Nathan just ran with it.”

“I just thought if it's the Fourth of July and we have a whole Wild West section we should be _doing_ something with it,” Oliver said. “You don't get much more American than Old West stuff.”

“I just wanted to do something fun,” Leah said, and she drooped so far I wanted to yell at Dale even though he was just doing his job. And wearing Levis.

“Christ. Don't make that face at me, Leah, you're worse than Nathan.” He sighed. “Did _any_ of you, Leah and Nathan especially, think about the implications of your “something fun” involving waving a bunch of guns around?”

I was about to say they weren't loaded when Leah gasped and covered her mouth before shaking her head, and I realized what he meant. Dale shook his own.

“Hand them over,” he said, and the other three did, so quickly it looked like a dance. I was going to point out mine was part of my costume, but then I remembered so was Mitchell's, and I just gave it to him.

“I have to get to a meeting. Mitchell, get the coach back on circuit. Nathan, get back onstage. Leah—” He kind of paused for a second. “How the hell did you two have the time to get over here, anyway?”

“Caroline's watching the Diva,” Oliver said. “She doesn't have anything to do until two-thirty anyway.”

“I had Mr. Scratch out around ten and I was going to give him his first break at twelve-thirty and take an hour to come over here and get back, but pretty much as soon as the park opened he dragged me back to his kennel,” Leah told him. “He did _not_ like all those people today.”

Dale grunted and headed off. I thought about following him, but didn't—work-Dale had a meeting, and work-Nathan was in some kind of shit of indeterminate depth, and I didn't want to risk work-Nathan and boyfriend-Nathan, who's still pissed but increasingly having an existential crisis about it, getting crossed.

I was the first one on break, at four, and as soon as I got back Madeleine was waiting for me behind Doc and Kitty's. She handed me a note. I read it, groaned, and headed for Dale's office.

I met Oliver and Leah on the way there, so I guessed it was going to be all four of us. Or maybe Mitchell was excused because of the horses, which was my guess when I realized he wasn't there. Dale waved us all in. He had his feet up on the desk again. It sounds like he fucks off a lot when I say that, but he kind of sits that way everywhere, especially if the furniture involved isn't sized for big people. Our prop revolvers were spread out in front of him.

“Your little stunt could have gotten us in a hell of a lot of trouble today,” he started. “If it wasn't the Fourth I doubt anybody outside Twin Vale would've mistaken these things for firecrackers, and I wouldn't have been able to tell them what was going on. Leah, Nathan, you two know even better what's at stake, bringing an unholstered prop like this into Twin Vale without permission.”

We all nodded at him. I felt just a little bit like a kid in the principal's office. Dale gestured at the revolvers.

“Lucky for all of you, your little gunfight already made it onto YouTube, and everyone thinks it was an officially-sanctioned performance. Reviews are in and they loved it. So you'll be doing it again at six.” Dale nodded at me. “Nathan, Mitchell's on break so he'll be back in time. Take him his gun.”

“Okay.”

Leah and Oliver ran off to change, but I stayed behind. Dale shuffled some pictures into a file—the YouTube video, probably—and looked up at me. “Need something?”

“I gave you a lot of trouble today. I wanted to apologize.”

Dale looked kind of surprised. Then he chuckled and shook his head.

“Nate, the day you _stop_ giving me trouble is when I start to worry.”

“Yeah, well, most of the trouble I give you doesn't land you in 'meetings' on a day absolutely no American human beings would be having meetings.”

“You're not wrong. But it turned out all right.” He looked exhausted. “I was mostly worried for Leah, if I'm honest. She almost got killed in this park because my dumb ass gave her an old revolver. I had a hell of a time explaining the connection between the Old West and the Fourth of July in American popular imagination, but we got there eventually.”

“So we get to go play dress-up.”

“Yeah. Speaking of which, I'd get back if I were you.” He tapped his phone. “You've got 45 minutes to get into Twin Vale, fill in Mitchell, and get everyone positioned. Any more fancy plans I should know about?”

“I mean, Mitchell and I were thinking about trying to do the creaky-floorboard thing in the saloons tonight to remind people about the fireworks, but that's not, you know. The same thing.”

Dale nodded at me and went back to his paperwork. I was on my way out when I saw him reach into his bottom drawer. I don't think he noticed me, but I still wanted to scream. The Dale I knew ten years ago wouldn't have kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk. Hell, the Dale I knew ten years ago barely drank beer. It's not that I begrudged him a drink after the afternoon he'd undoubtedly had--it was seeing it so close in reach.

The second stagecoach robbery went off great.

I found out Leah knows just enough about horses to drive a stagecoach, at least provided its original driver is right there to keep the horses from freaking out. She and Oliver leaped up alongside Mitchell, and I'm not entirely sure it wasn't planned to keep me out of the driver's seat again, because as soon as they did Oliver yelled me to the back to get up on the same signal bar Leah rode earlier.

Also, Leah's a fucking speed demon. I never knew you could have a lead foot with horses, and I _really_ don't ever want to see it again. I used to take them up as fast as I could go, sometimes, in the off-season--like when she fell off the coach, which I guess she wrote about--but she made me look slow.

We closed down Twin Vale around eight-thirty. Or more correctly, we started doing the rounds to remind people about the fireworks at eight-thirty, and then we were free to head to Hollywood if we wanted to see them ourselves. I'm pretty sure absolutely nobody was crying about getting off 90 minutes early and still getting paid for it. I certainly wasn't, anyway.

It felt weird, heading into Casablanca in costume while the park was open. It looked about like I remembered from the Fourth I worked the bar—three bartenders, all with open black bowties and white sleeves rolled up to their elbows, shaking and pouring and pulling taps, all but running to keep up, every tabletop in the dining service area full. I wandered up, fished a five out of my onstage wallet, and slid it across. I was answered by one of the female bartenders, whose nametag said “Alex” and who reminded me in some vague way of an old movie star. Not just because we were in Hollywood, either, it was something about the face. Maybe her makeup.

“How much for something that looks like whiskey and isn't a damn house?”

She kind of laughed and tried to push my five back. “I've got a julep made with coffee. You know you don't have to pay in here.”

“That's very nice of you. Keep the five.”

And then I watched her literally tuck it in her half-buttoned shirt. She picked the wrong person to try it on, but she pretty obviously knew how to pull in tips. I used to have a trick for tips, too. Mine involved accidentally discovering that saying "it's my pleasure" instead of "be happy to" has a certain kind of effect on women who are a certain age, and suddenly you have new friends who want to give you money.

I ended up putting another five on the bar just for the effort, so I guess it worked after all. You can't count on people to tip on holidays, especially when it's busy and they think they've had to wait five seconds too long.

Out of the four main plazas in the park, Hollywood is easily the prettiest. Almost the whole thing is built out of movie references—the lampposts are from Singin' in the Rain, the fountain is a model of one in Central Park that gets used in movies a lot, the clock above the plaza is modeled after the Big Ben face even though it's not in a tower, and there are lights in the trees.

The plaza used to be ringed with gray and blue stones that looked like the Hollywood Walk of Fame but in a different color, but at some point in the last ten years all of it was taken up and replaced with the yellow-and-red-brick swirl from The Wizard of Oz. I guess it wasn't too surprising--all of Candyland is the Yellow Brick Road--but I still wondered why.

I was standing on the steps of Casablanca with my coffee julep, watching the crowd and feeling just a little smug to be standing on its front steps after what I learned last week, when Dale popped up next to me.

“I wondered if you'd be out here.”

“I used to wonder the same thing about you, every year.”

There was an awkward silence, and then he said no.

“I'm surprised.”

Dale shook his head. “The first Fourth I spent as the manager here was the one where I dragged you out from behind the bar to watch with me. After that . . . ” His eyes met mine, and I was surprised to see he looked sober. “You told me it was the first Fourth you'd ever celebrated. It . . . seemed wrong, after that. To be out here.”

“It was. The first one, I mean. My family celebrated Juneteenth instead.”

“So this . . . . is your second one?”

“Yeah, basically.”

We stood on the stairs for a few minutes while I finished my julep. I put the glass down on one of the trays by the doors. Alcohol usually doesn't leave Casablanca, but there are exceptions for firework nights. Some people just want to watch with a beer in their hand.

“Nothing to drink?”

“I had one earlier.”

“That's it?”

There was one of those pauses you get when someone's trying to put something into words, and while Dale put things together I heard a hiss, and a click, and then “I've Been Everywhere” started playing over the Hollywood plaza speakers. He finally picked up again about the time Johnny Cash started rattling off state names.

“I really let myself go to hell after what happened to you. Maybe if I hadn't, I could've found a way to help you sooner instead of having to wait and rely on someone else.”

“Okay?”

“And now someone else is hurting under my watch, because I fucked up. I've already determined Leah's turning is outside the contract. I can help her, or at least try, as long as it doesn't come into direct conflict with the rules I'm bound by.” He met my eyes again. His looked watery, like he was trying not to tear up because then the bawling would start entirely outside his control. “Giving up and letting somebody else clean up my mess the first time was chickenshit. Doing it again would just be a fucking insult to you.” He looked over the plaza. “If I'm going to help you help her, I have to get my shit together. Getting drunk isn't a luxury I can afford right now.”

Taking his hand was probably stupid, but there's some things, when you know somebody well enough, you can say better without words, and I think _thank you_ is one of them.

We ended up getting slowly pushed down the steps by people leaving Casablanca, crowding the plaza to the tune of Party in the USA. I saw a few sparklers going off on the cobbles—the nice thing about Hollywood is, there are so many nooks and crannies in a basic big open space, you can cram a whole lot of people in the plaza and still be spread out. The crowd was getting louder, though, the same kind of louder you hear when you're at a concert and the band's about to come on but the lights aren't down yet. I felt my phone go off in my wallet, and glanced around to check for little kids before pulling it out. It was Leah, crammed into the Pied Piper window with Anne and Maxine, all three sticking their tongues out at the camera.

_You coming up? View's great._

_I'm in Hollywood with Dale._

What I got back was an entire line of emoticons I couldn't decipher.

_English, please?_

More emoticons. At least these ones were all winking and blowing kisses, which translates just fine back over a decade. I rolled my eyes.

_Don't be a jerk. Enjoy the fireworks._ I paused. _Don't forget to put your fountain back when you're done being idiots in the window._

I know I couldn't actually hear her laughing all the way from Hollywood, but it sure felt like it. Dale glanced over at me. “Everything okay?”

“Just Leah being obnoxious.”

Dale snorted. Then he squeezed my hand.

When the fireworks started, I squeezed back.


	17. I'm Furious

Sorry for another gap in reporting in, guys. Things have been happening here for the last couple of weeks, but none of them have really had to do with anything. It's more like “stuff happens, when you're alive.” I'll share a couple of them just to get you caught up with me.

Dale found a box in the back of the closet when he was trying to find a pair of workboots, and when he opened it he found out it was mine. Apparently he packed it full of stuff of mine he couldn't bear to throw out and couldn't stand to look at, which means I have a lot of my important stuff back, or, well, the kind of stuff that's important to you when you're twenty years old and broke as hell. Half a dozen band T-shirts, some CDs, my good copy of the Silmarillion, some photos. For starting my life over from a single box, it's a pretty nice little treasure trove.

Leah told me to consider her spare bedroom mine, at least until we can get her turning reversed. I'm still on an air mattress, but with my stuff back—including a couple of Dale's old photography projects on the wall, the ones he couldn't stand and I thought belonged in a damn museum—it feels like having an actual home again, albeit one with a very noticeable missing presence.

I have a scripted line now for girls who want to ask for my phone number while I'm in costume. Caroline and Oliver apparently have the same problem, but I have an advantage they don't, which is that it's completely in character for me to not know what a phone number is, or, for that matter, a phone.

I got a real laptop with my last paycheck. I've been scanning in Dale's park documents—the old blueprints, the purchase orders, everything from the file he gave me. It hasn't really turned up anything, but I can do stuff like laying blueprints overtop of each other to see the park in 3D now.

I ran into a little kid in the park the other day who told me when she grows up she wants to be a ballerina astronaut cowboy princess ninja doctor. Not all of these things at some point, mind you, she wants to be all six at once. I told her when I grow up I want to be a train engineer but instead of a train whistle I'll just stick my head out the window and yell really loud, and she giggled until she fell on her butt, and then just kept giggling from the ground. The kids in this job are a trip and a half. I'm actually kind of glad I didn't end up back in Casablanca at this point, although I'm never going to say so out loud, just in case upper management gets any ideas.

At least three people who've seen Maxine and me in the same spot have asked if we're siblings. We don't even look alike. At this point we're just kind of laughing about it, because what else can you do.

Oliver bet me fifty bucks I wouldn't ride the drop tower in the horror section. It's nowhere near the biggest one in North America, but it's still 175 feet tall, and I'm not afraid of heights but I'm not a huge fan of them, either. Mitchell and Maxine decided to get in on the bet, which ended with me throwing up as soon as I got off and then staggering over to Leah's little corner of horror with a hundred and fifty bucks it only took me about two minutes to earn. We decided to use it to order something incredibly fancy for dinner and ate in her studio that night after park close.

I broke the only-hand-to-hand-contact rule without thinking about it when a kid fell off the hitching rail outside one of the gift shops and busted his face. Dale told me he'd let it go because the kid was covered in blood and I was trying to figure out if he had a head wound. (It turned out to be a tooth he knocked out on the edge of a barrel.) He did tell me he had to give me at least a verbal warning for it because the rule is in place to prevent lawsuits and he had to do the same with me as he would anyone else, and I told him that was fine, but I'd take the warning over watching a kid sit and scream while his mom waited for first aid help to come any day. He told me that was about what he expected.

Six different staff members have asked for my biscuit recipe and only one's gotten close to replicating it. They're all assuming I have some secret family ingredient I don't tell them about. The sad truth is, I actually got the recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook and it's just that none of them can follow directions.

Anne asked _incredibly_ shyly if I know how to make ratatouille. I said yes, like a complete liar, because she's adorable, and then I went home and looked up some recipes and I have no idea how I didn't learn this years ago. We had a pre-open lunch with my first shot at it, and Leah and Darius both decided I should be on Masterchef.

I showed up to one of these pre-open lunches and found Maxine sitting on Leah's lap and giggling, and Darius sitting on Maxine's lap and giggling, so I sort of shrugged and sat on Darius' lap, and then Oliver came in and sat on my lap, and then Anne sat on Oliver's lap just as Dale walked in and the whole damned stack of us fell over with our legs around each other, laughing like hell. Dale just said “it's too early for this shit” and walked back out, and we all laughed harder, and then Leah made a crack about what if Dale sat on Anne's lap, and I shouldn't be allowed to speak before food and coffee in the morning because totally without thinking about it I said “he's 250 pounds, I don't feel like being under that today” and in the resulting pandemonium I also said it was too early for this shit and ducked out.

Caroline promised me brownies if I came back. To her credit, she did actually bring brownies the next day. I don't think they came out of a box, either. It's been four days and Anne still can't look at me without cracking up, but Oliver's stopped wolf-whistling at me, so there's that. I also still don't know what the tower of lap-sitting was for, by the way, just if you're wondering.

Oliver found out somewhere I thought he was hot, and I kind of panicked and tried to apologize, and he just gave me the most confused look I've ever seen and said something that kind of caught me off-guard: “You're allowed to be a human being, you know.” Then we spent five or ten minutes going back and forth over whether I was out of line, and he finally called an end to it by telling me he didn't care if I was gay, he'd care if I was a creep, and there's nothing inherently creepy about having eyeballs. And anyway--and this is me quoting him here--he knows he has a great ass and it's good to know _somebody_ appreciates it. I'm starting to get my head around the idea that “gay people are people” happened while I was gone, but “and straight people don't care” is still blowing my mind.

Also I get the impression he kind of wants to punch my dad now, but a lot of people want to punch my dad, so that's nothing new.

The new commercial went live, finally. I got into the park last payday and went to pick up my check just in time to hear Dale on the phone with somebody who called and was apparently pissed off by it, because people will find anything to be pissed at these days, I guess. Dale was doing the calm-but-dead-inside manager voice going "ma'am. Ma'am. Ma'am" over and over and finally she apparently said exactly the wrong thing, because I have literally never seen Dale _snap_ like that, and his response deserves to be written down simply because it's one of those things where you look back later and wonder how the hell you came up with that completely off the cuff: " _Ma'am._ First of all, if you're willing to accept the conceit of a Wild West town existing in the 21st century, I'm reasonably sure you can accept a black cowboy. Second of all, I suggest you pick up a history book instead of a spaghetti western because _most_ cowboys in that time period were black and Mexican. And third of all, the crew of this park has been fully integrated since 1923, and I have no intention of changing that now, but if you'd prefer to spend your money in a place with a long and storied history of racism I hear Disney World is lovely this time of year."  
  
And then he hung up.

I'm trying really, really hard not to fall head over heels again, but he's making that _incredibly_ difficult.

And that brings us up to today. Like I said, all random life-happens-while-you're-alive stuff.

Today, though, I cornered Oliver while he was letting the Diva out and said “hey, wanna come spend some unsupervised time in an abandoned bunker?”

I don't think human beings can actually perk their ears the way dogs can, but he sort of gave the impression of doing that anyway. “Are there bodies?”

“Not that I know of?”

“Is there actual light in there?”

“I brought flashlights. With wrist straps.”

“Are we gonna get attacked by random shit again?”

“Hopefully not.”

“I'm in.”

We got to the Twin Vale cellar by ten-thirty, and when I handed Oliver his flashlight and headed down the steps he peeked his head in and shook it before following me.

We shined our flashlights around, and I filled him in on how I'd first found the place. The cellar is small, maybe six feet by eight feet, with regular concrete walls and a few of those aluminum industrial shelving units around. Oliver pinned one of the shelving units with his flashlight.

“That's painted.”

“Huh?”

“Listen.” He walked up to it and knocked on one of the shelves. I was expecting a metallic _clank._ Instead I heard a solid and distinctly wooden _thunk._

“Why paint it to blend in? Why not just leave it alone? Nobody's going to care about mismatched shelves in a storage space.” He stared at it a minute longer, then peered between the shelves before reaching back to knock on the wall.

It wasn't wall. It was a shelf-back, painted to look like concrete, and it sounded _hollow._

“There's something back here.”

Oliver nodded me up to the painted shelf, and between us we pulled it forward enough to see a black, door-shaped hole behind. We looked at each other.

“Are we going in there?” Oliver looked uneasy. I didn't know if I looked it, but I sure felt it. I hadn't seen any kind of underground room on any of the park blueprints.

“Stick something between the shelf and the wall so we can get back out.”

Oliver looked around, then pulled out his car keys and set them on the ground. He glanced up at me.

“I put an iron ingot on there after what happened this winter.”

“Good idea.” I wanted to point out his car keys wouldn't help much if something, or someone, decided to take a more traditional approach and just blockade the shelf, but we had enough problems without adding to them.

The hole turned out to be a hallway. A manmade one, too—still floored and walled with concrete, with wooden beams for weight balance. I was about to ask Oliver _why not steel?_ when the concrete abruptly ended, and the hallway turned into an open alcove walled with dirt, and I thought I might pass out.

In all these years, it never occurred to me to wonder where Warin's enclosure was, until I was standing in it.

The alcove had to be set right below Twin Vale's main plaza. There was a dark pool of water on one side I wouldn't have taken a drink from if I was dying of thirst—it smelled _stale,_ and dangerous in a way I'm not sure I could describe if you gave me a lifetime to do it. The room was lit—albeit dimly—by these weird tendrils I thought might be bioluminescent plants, although how any kind of plant could survive here was beyond me. Some kind of moss or lichen living on the wooden support posts, maybe. Or maybe something from the Underground.

And all around the walls, pictures.

Hundreds of them.

Some were black and white, and odd sizes that became more understandable when I saw them up close—a woman with light, probably-gray hair, wearing a collared dress, looking adoringly at a tall, spare man in shirtsleeves and glasses, sitting at a piano. The same couple on a stage. A newspaper clipping, showing them on the steps of the Bijou Theatre--he in a sport coat, she in a smart ladies' suit.

Grace and Robert.

There were two or three of a young woman who looked remarkably like Leah, but her hairstyle and clothing made it clear she was someone else, from long ago. There were angry X's drawn over her photographs. And a few others, next to her, of a black woman with her hair up in a victory roll. She was X'ed out, too.

I spotted a row of promo pictures, an unimpressed blonde in a revealing nurse's costume circled in each. Half a dozen of the photos were Polaroids, taken from weird angles, the lighting patchy, like someone was learning how to use a camera. I'd seen another shot exactly like them in Dale's files—Laila, taking her first and only season of park photographs.

There were a whole slew of them that pissed me off to the point of rage, and you probably know exactly who was in them, but the reason I saw red and felt my hands shake had nothing to do—well, almost nothing—with my face on Warin's walls.

It was the composition—weird angles, but more confident, the kind of thing a reviewer would probably call “a unique perspective.” And a certain kind of intangible thing anybody who's a photo expert could probably tell you about—the thing where you can just look at a photo and say “I know who took this.” That, and a memory:

_Fucking asshole isn't even supposed to be outside Twin Vale. Nate, did you grab my camera bag?_

These weren't just photos of me. They were _stolen_ photos of me. Dale never did find his bag, and he was way more upset about it than his dad could understand, given that his Nikon was in his hand when the bag came up missing. But I knew why: there was an entire roll of film in there he'd just finished, and our entire first day at the park together—before I worked here, before Dale was even the manager—was on that roll. The two of us on the carousel, me trying (and miserably failing) to win something at the Twin Vale shooting gallery, a mini-tripod shot in an offbeat corner with the park just visible behind us and Dale's signature framing separating us from it.

I pulled a couple of the photos down before Oliver could see them. Dale hadn't exactly spent the entire roll at the park, if you get my drift.

“There's a whole wall of Leah in here.”

“I'm not surprised.” One of them was a newspaper clipping from the park centennial. Leah was near the front of the shot, laughing at the camera. Like Laila before her, she was circled in every group shot. Oliver looked between her photos and Laila's, and then at the wall I was standing in front of, still furious but also kind of shocked just how many of the photos _hadn't_ been taken by Dale. One was in a frame, and I recognized it at once—he and I both had a copy, and he'd kept his on his desk. His dad had taken it, the two of us sitting on the bench under the weeping willow by the front office and laughing at each other. I should have recognized it, of course--I was the one who'd bought the frame it was in.

It was the one Leah mentioned in her blog, and I yanked it off the wooden post it'd been attached to. The asshole didn't have a right, not to any of us, but splashing the most private parts of our life together across his room like some kind of torture porn _really_ tore it for me.

Oliver frowned. “Hey Nathan?”

“Yeah?” I was trying to sound calm, and kind of being grateful Warin was dead, because if he wasn't I would've killed him, and that _really_ wouldn't have gone over well with upper management.

“Why's everybody circled in group pictures, but when it's just you and Dale together there aren't any circles?”

“Because he—”

I stopped.

Oliver was right.

When Grace was pictured with a second person who wasn't Robert, she was circled. When Robert was shown next to her with nobody else, no circle. Leah and Laila were both in group pictures, and circled. There was a photo of me as part of a formal lineup at Casablanca, and I was circled.

But the shot of Dale and me on the carousel—no circle.

The one in the little odd corner—no circle.

The only time any of us pretenders weren't circled was when we were alone in the picture, or standing with another pretender and _only_ another pretender.

Leah's blog about Dale's scars, his name scrawled desperately all over himself with a knife, slammed back into my head.

_He just barely got out._

For some reason, Warin decided not to take both of us. Maybe because he thought it'd be more fun to watch Dale suffer. Or maybe because he planned to take both of us at separate times, and Dale got one step ahead of him by making himself literally unforgettable.

Part of me wanted to yank all the photos off the walls and run out with them. Another part recognized how wildly impractical that would be, but most of me was just . . . spinning. In shock, I guess. Oliver touched my shoulder, and I jumped.

“We'd better get back out of here,” he said. “We know what it is now. It'll still be here after park close if you want to, you know . . . ”

“Yeah.”

We left it, but I still didn't want to. I was clothed in the photos I left up, but somehow I felt more naked leaving them there. I handed Oliver the framed photo.

“Do me a favor, would you? Do you have time to run this to Dale before you have to get dressed?”

“Probably not, but I can drop it in the breakroom and have Caroline take it.”

“Please.”

I watched him head off before I went to get changed. I wasn't able to go back after park close—I mean, I could have, in theory, but after ten hours running around with kids all I wanted to do was check on Leah and go home.

But I want to go back. I want my damned pictures.

And I want to find out who those crossed-out girls are. 


	18. I'm a Walking Disaster

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for discussion of nonconsensual sexual themes.

I quit asking for help when I was ten years old.

My social studies teacher said on Wednesday she'd give a very nice amount of extra credit to anyone who could memorize all fifty state capitals by the start of class on Friday. I'd bombed a test near the beginning of the year and wanted to make up the points, so I took on the challenge, which is a lot harder to pull off in 48 hours than it sounds.

At some point on Thursday evening I told my dad I was having problems. His response was “Nathan, meditate on the Lord, and he will help you.”

I thought I was being logical when I said “Jesus don't know the state capitals, Dad, he's from Galilee.” But in my dad's eyes, I was simultaneously mouthing off and limiting the Holy Spirit, both of which were huge no-gos in our house.

I didn't get the extra credit.

I was at home, trying to find a halfway-comfortable way to sit, and reading the Bible to find a miracle to write an essay about for my dad.

After that I decided it was better to just figure it out for myself. Even when I was living with Dale, who probably would've learned how to build a damned rocket if I asked him to bring me a star, I had to sort of come up sideways on asking for anything as simple as help with the dishes. I've never really stopped being that way.

I was ready to sit on my ass and rot forever in the park rather than accepting Leah's help, and that should probably tell you a lot.

I'm not telling you this for pity, by the way. It's just that I really need you to understand how completely unintentional this was.

Also, it's incredibly embarrassing. But I promised to be honest, so just know you can't possibly judge me any harder than I'm judging myself.

We had another day of the worst possible weather yesterday, and this time it included hail _and_ a tornado watch, because why the fuck should this year go halfway on anything, so I decided to go to the park to keep Leah company. There wasn't even any hope of opening for a half-day.

I was surprised to see Caroline's Jeep sitting by the employee entrance when I got in. I figured I'd be the only one crazy enough to try it. But there it sat, and when I peeked inside it I actually saw a whole pile of purses. Girls' day in, I guess.

I thought I'd find them all in Leah's room, but the castle was empty. The glass front of Casablanca was completely dark when I'd passed it, and there was no way all of them had pissed off to Twin Vale, not in this weather. I listened to the hail beat on the Pied Piper window. If it was better weather, and the girls weren't around, I'd head straight for Mr. Scratch, but I was pretty sure Leah wouldn't have ditched company for a faerie dog no matter how much she loves him.

Finally I decided to just send a text to Leah and Caroline and see if they could give me directions. Leah sent me a cryptic line of emojis.

_Little early for Halloween jokes, Leah._

_We have to teach you how to read emojis, Nathan._

_Then what the hell is 👹👻🎃 supposed to mean?_

Caroline's number chimed. _Horror section. Forgive her, Maxine brought pixie sticks._

I followed directions to the arcade over in horror, and then nearly fell on my ass screaming when Maxine suddenly opened a painted-over door in the wall. "In here."

"Welcome to hell!" Leah yelled, and then giggled. I just stared at the open door, pretty sure I was having a heart attack. Caroline popped out, shaking her head.

"Come on in. Leah got sick of the castle so we decided to watch movies in here."

The room Maxine and Caroline ushered me into was pretty obviously never finished. The walls were still mostly plywood, the floor painted to look like hardwood but still clearly not. I looked up at the ceiling. No help there, either.

"What is this?"

"Hallway to Hell," Maxine said. "It was supposed to be an escape room, but that right there--" she knocked on the wall into the arcade--"is a load-bearing wall, Dale said, and they weren't ever able to finish it because they couldn't go underneath."

"So they just left it?"

"Guess so. Hey, want something to drink? We got sweet tea and coffee and Caroline brought hard cider."

"We're not supposed to have liquor in horror."

Maxine gave me this look that said she loved me, but I was dumb. "What Dale and the liquor license board don't know won't hurt them."

I thought about asking for a plain sweet tea. I should have, in retrospect.

But it'd been a hell of a week.

So I asked for a cider and then poured tea in it and swallowed about half of it in one go, and we turned the movie back on. 

"Seriously, you guys pick _one thing_ from my teen years and it's _Dude, Where's My Car?"_

"You say that like it's a bad thing, but you recognize it," Leah said. She had a point, so I just finished my cider.

And then made a really terrible decision and asked if it was okay to have a second one.

I should probably tell you here that Dale and I are two very different kinds of drunk. First of all, he's huge. Dale is that mythical guy your one friend knows who slams three shots in thirty minutes and then gets up and walks a straight line, because he's so big it just doesn't hit him the same. He's also a philosophical, if dirty, drunk--the kind who asks questions like “do you think clouds ever get lonely, and when planes fly through it's like they're hugging them?” and then starts crying because clouds don't have mouths and can't ever tell anyone they're lonely. You can distract him from the crying by taking off your clothes.

I, however, am tiny. If you've ever heard about the girl who gets drunk on half a beer--it's always a girl, I guess because there aren't many guys that small--that's me. I'd probably fail a breathalyzer on a single dose of cough syrup. And where Dale's philosophical, I'm just chatty--the kind of drunk who laughs a lot and can't stay on topic and tells you too much about his sex life right before trying to involve you in it.

If you're wondering if this has anything to do with how Dale and I got together, I think the current phrase is "stop calling me out like this."

Eventually the conversation turned to why we were all in the park on such a shitty day to begin with, and Leah said at least we didn't have to worry about Warin showing up, since he was free-roaming, because she'd worry he'd try accelerating the process again.

I'm perfectly capable of making the decision to shut up when I'm drunk. At least, in theory. In practice, I don't think I've made the decision to shut up while drunk ever, even once, in my entire life.

“What I don't get,” I told her, and I remember telling her this but not whether I'd forgotten the other girls were there or if I'd just decided it didn't matter, “is why he kissed you, but I got to drink something he spit in. I'm not sure if that's racist or homophobic or both.”

“Maybe it was like that one Egyptian myth,” Caroline said. “With the god who put his come on a salad and got another one of the gods to eat it—”

“Excuse me, the only come I've ever swallowed in my life was—”

Leah covered my mouth. I really don't think I can explain to you how much I love her sometimes.

Of course, eventually she had to move her hand.

“You know what? I'm going to go with racist, because the stupid motherfucker had _my naked pictures_ that weren't even _for_ him hanging over his fucking bed and he doesn't get to jack off to my face and then say he doesn't like gay people.”

Have you ever seen one of those movies where something happens that's so drastic there's a literal record scratch, and then everyone all turns to stare at one thing, all at the same time?

I had no idea that could happen in real life.

I've also never heard four completely different responses so perfectly add up to “what the fuck?” before.

The absolute winner, though, went to Anne, who's about five-nothing and chubby with actual ringlets and looks like she ought to be one of Santa's elves, who spit out “the sick bastard stole your fucking nudes?”

I don't think I've ever heard Anne swear before.

Maxine actually grabbed her phone and took a picture of my face. It'd be hilarious, if I didn't know what was happening when I made it.

I spent a couple of minutes on a loop of “you swore, you dropped an actual f-bomb, holy _shit_ Anne you _swore_ ” before Caroline nudged me back toward explaining what exactly the fuck I meant by naked pictures and Warin's bed, and I told them about the cellar in Twin Vale and the pictures on the walls. I'd been spending a couple hours a day down there trying to pull them all down, but there were a lot more than I'd thought at first, at least a couple thousand, and it was taking forever. I think I tried explaining the thing with Dale's camera bag at least three times. None of them quite seemed to get why it was so important to me. To be totally fair, I'm not sure why it's so important to me, except maybe that Dale's photography was something of his that was untouched by the park, something that was just his, and Warin had to take that too.

Eventually I got bored with trying to explain the photos and told them about the Jim Crow theatre and the body Oliver found, and we started telling ghost stories.

And that could have been where it ended, except for one thing:

I forgot Leah doesn't drink. And she likes to fix things.

Which is why, when I turned up at work this morning with literally the worst hangover I've had in my entire life, consoling myself that I'd have a couple of hours in dark and solitude to recover—and possibly the chance to vomit on Warin's floor—I instead found myself met with Anne, Maxine, Caroline, and Darius.

The girls had already heard the story. Darius didn't know most of it, but he knew he needed to come hold a bookshelf open, and not one of the four was willing to let me refuse.

“Leah'd be here too if we thought it'd be safe for her to go down there, and you know it, Nathan,” Maxine told me. “We're going to finish it today if it takes us right up to open.”

Anne looked at least as hungover as I felt, so at least it wasn't just me, and we were mostly silent until we were in the dirt alcove. Maxine wrinkled her nose.

“Smells like a damn tar pit in here.”

“Smells like his spit in here,” I told her, and started pulling down photos again. Caroline put a box on the floor for us to toss pictures in, to be sorted later. I'd already started leaving a few bare patches on the walls, but with the girls helping it was like watching one of those long-exposure films where you can watch a flower bloom in 30 seconds.

Maxine bent over near the pool, and I had the thought I should probably grab her before she could fall in—because who knows what's in there—and then she stood up with something in her hands.

“Nathan? I think I found something,” she said, and then I heard a zipper and then a startled oh and then she pushed the thing into my hands. “Maybe you better be the one to go through this.”

It was Dale's camera bag, and other than a few black stains, it looked exactly like it had when it came up missing.

“Holy shit, he had like three thousand dollars in lenses in here, he's gonna be so what the _fuck_.”

There was another roll's worth of photos inside, none of them the kind you'd put on your parents' piano. Certainly not ones I knew had been taken. And completely lacking in any of Dale's little signature touches. These almost looked like the person taking them had never used a camera—kind of jittery and dark. In a few of them a finger was visible at the bottom, and after a couple seconds it hit me what the weird glare in the corners was: Dale's office window.

You don't need to know exactly what the photos were. If I tell you we were both nineteen and stupid and ever so slightly adrenaline junkies and that Maxine decided they were private after a single glance, that's probably enough context for you to figure it out on your own.

What you do need to know is that they were taken from outside the office, and that I knew exactly what day this was, and when, and that I could confidently say absolutely nobody else was in the park at six in the morning, not even maintenance.

Well. Except one person, who strictly speaking didn't even have to sleep.

“Where did that son of a bitch get a camera?”

I didn't even realize I'd said it out loud, but all three of the girls stopped what they were doing, and Anne actually asked what I was talking about before Maxine touched her shoulder and said something too low for me to hear.

I zipped the bag up so fast I thought I broke the zipper, and almost started crying before deciding my head couldn't take it. Caroline touched my shoulder.

“Do you want to take the bag to Dale, and we can finish up down here?”

I really, really didn't. Strictly speaking, I know I didn't do anything wrong. Warin stole the rolls of already-taken pictures, and apparently a camera; Warin chose to intrude on us being a pair of dumb fuckstruck teenagers. But if I gave Dale the bag I'd have to tell him about where I found it, and what else I found there, and the idea of telling him _by the way, somebody else saw the photos we took our first night in the apartment, the ones that were supposed to be yours, when you used to spend entire nights trying to convince me I wasn't going to hell for being human and we had our own little bubble in the world and it was small and simple but it was ours_ made me sick to my stomach.

I didn't actually say any of that, but apparently there's a specific facial expression that goes with it, because Caroline took my hand and tugged on it.

“We can go together. Anne and Maxine can finish up, there's not that much left.”

I pulled my hand away and shook my head, and she grabbed it again before reaching for my other one, too.

“You've done so much for Leah. Just let us help you back, would you?”

“Do I have to?”

Caroline let out a squeak like she was trying not to laugh, for the sake of those of us still nursing our mistakes from the night before.

“I think we'd appreciate it, yeah.”

I finally let her walk me to Dale's office. I spent the whole time trying to figure out in my head what I could say to him— _the good news is, we found your camera bag, the bad news is what's inside it_ —but when we were finally standing in front of him I opened my mouth, shut it, opened it again, bit my lip, saw him give me this look like he thought I might be about to tell him someone died, and then just put the bag on his desk and started crying.

Not particularly elegant, but it got the point across, I guess.

I was pretty sure he recognized it, and I thought he'd open it to see what the hell was wrong now, but instead he got up and put his arms around me. There were slightly more arms than there should have been, and after a second it dawned on me Caroline was hugging me from the other side. I could tell they were talking over my head, or, well, Dale over my head and Caroline over my shoulder, but I was too busy being hysterical and hungover-- _not_ a good mix, by the way, I choked a couple of times and thought I might throw up every time--to actually take part in the conversation. Eventually Caroline gave my arm a squeeze, and then it was just Dale and me. It hit me suddenly that we were standing in front of the same fucking window, and I took a step out of its immediate line of view, dragging him with me by the waist. Which put us right in front of the open office door, and it's humorous now in this stupid dark kind of way, but at the time I didn't even think about the absurdity. 

I have no idea how long we were standing in the corner, but by the time I finally slowed down from bawling to crying I felt like somebody'd driven a railroad spike into my head and Dale was covered in both tears and snot. He just kind of shrugged out of his button-down to the tee-shirt beneath it and kept on stroking my hair until I managed to start breathing like a normal person again.

“I'm not planning to look. But do you want to go through it before I open it?”

I just kind of shook my head. I didn't even give a shit if his camera lenses were in there anymore, and I'd been so excited to see the fucking bag when I remembered what was supposed to be in it I almost forgot my hangover for a minute.

Dale pulled me over to one of the chairs in front of the desk and coaxed me into sitting before opening a desk drawer, pulling out an envelope, and opening the bag. He shuffled the photos into the envelope and tucked the envelope closed before holding it up.

“Do you want me to destroy them, or do you want to?”

I just shook my head again. There's a point, when you've been crying really hard, where it sort of feels like you're not exactly a person anymore. Things are happening, around you and maybe even to you, but none of it registers.

“Do you want me to do it?”

I nodded, but more because the idea of someone else doing something so I didn't have to sounded as good as anything could in that post-bawl state.

I heard a soft _thwack_ I was pretty sure was the envelope being tossed on his desk, and then he sat down in the chair next to me. I think I actually dozed off while he was making a phone call, because I thought I only blinked but when I opened my eyes again Leah was standing next to me.

I ended up not going on shift until a little after five. Leah put me to bed in the castle and gave me a glass and a gallon of water, and I woke up around four with a soft knock at the door. Caroline peeked in and asked how I was doing and if I wanted soup. My head still hurt—still does, actually, and probably will tomorrow, too, it's been through a lot today—but I could see again, for a given value of "seeing" that included having to squint a little because I'd cried my contacts out. Which is a good thing, I guess, actually. Sleeping in them is about the worst thing you can possibly do and I don't think I'd have actually remembered to take them out.

I said yes to the soup because I thought it'd make Caroline feel better, and when she was gone I sat up to have some more of the water and saw an envelope on Leah's bedside table with my name on it in Dale's handwriting.

I opened it—but carefully, it was taped instead of tucked and Dale never actually seals envelopes without good reason—and found it was full of ashes. I think I actually smiled at it, kind of, before closing it again and tipping the whole thing into Leah's trash can.

I washed my face and ate the soup Caroline brought and got into the park. It felt weird, knowing what was underneath it, but not . . . _awful_ anymore. The fucker could show back up and then he'd see how it felt to have people getting in your personal space.

I've still got to go through the photos and see what's in there. Some of them Leah and I might want to keep, and I want to see if there are any more of the crossed-out girls.

But that's for tomorrow.


	19. I'm An Emotional Support Nathan

Dale didn't come to work today.

At first, we all thought maybe he was just coming in closer to call time; he's usually there by seven or eight in the morning, but sometimes he shows up at call at 11am, and sometimes even not until 11:30.

But when noon rolled around it was Gary who unlocked the gates, and by two all of us were trying to reach Dale by phone. Days off happen—we all take them, once in awhile, and Dale's no exception—but pretty much never without him telling us he won't be in.

By break time, I was ready to lose my mind. I asked over the walkie if anybody else had had any luck reaching him. The answer, of course, was no, and I could have screamed. I spent most of my break reminding myself he's not my responsibility, he's a grownass man, he's got a life . . . and then every time I just kept coming back to him cradling an injured Leah in his arms, and holding me in the office, and wondering where the hell he was.

Mitchell's been riding in with someone because his alternator died and he's got to get it fixed, but he offered to move into horror after the horses were put away if Darius could take me over to Dale's, and Darius agreed, so Mitchell put them up early and by eight we were on the road.

Darius's car has a port where you can actually plug in your phone and play music, which I think existed when I landed on the stagecoach, but only for people way richer than me. Anyway, he plugged in and put on somebody named Bruno Mars. It's my first new music since the stagecoach, and I kind of get the feeling Darius knew that. It was mellow enough to help with my nerves, but not so quiet it put me to sleep, and I just took off my glasses and closed my eyes while he drove.

Granted, some of it hit pretty close to home, but what the fuck doesn't these days.

We pulled up outside the apartment, and Darius cut the engine.

“Do you have a key?”

“No, but I know where the spare is.” Assuming Dale hadn't moved it, at least. Darius nodded at me.“How long do you want?”

“I can text if it's going to be more than an hour?”

“Sounds good.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Call me if you need help.”

“Okay.”

The spare was still living exactly where I left it the last time I put it away a decade ago, but most of the rest of the apartment wasn't. I didn't really notice the last time I was here—I was too busy being out of my mind scared, and later drained—but at some point in the last ten years Dale stripped everything down to nothing. Pictures of the two of us were gone, which didn't surprise me, but the ones he'd taken and put into a triptych when he took his first and only trip to New York City were missing, too, and that did. Even some of the framed posters were gone. The walls were noticeably bare—even more, if you knew where to look for the nail holes.

Dale was on the sofa, apparently passed out. The camera bag Maxine found in Warin's lair was sitting next to the coffee table, and what was left of its contents was spread over the table—camera lenses, a couple of rolls of film carefully labeled in Dale's blocky handwriting, a small digital camera I remember someone in his family giving him. He used it twice, basically so he wouldn't look ungrateful, and then went right back to his Nikon.

There were two bottles of alcohol on the table—one the kind you might clean camera lenses with, and one the kind you might clean your insides with. The second one was a lot emptier than the first one, and when I got closer to the table I saw one of the lenses was cracked down the middle. Not an old-looking crack, either. No—this looked more like Dale'd gotten way too involved in trying to clean them and damaged one. At first I thought the pink, raw scrapes on the backs of his wrists might have had something to do with damaging the lens, but when I took one of his hands to look at it—just in case he'd been up to something more concerning—I realized no, these were rub marks, not cuts. There was one on his shoulder, too, just visible around the neck of his shirt.

He was breathing okay, so I took a look around to try to piece everything together. If Dale's anything, he's loyal to his commitments. I couldn't imagine him being late for anything less than an ambulance, either his or someone else's—much less not showing up at all.

It didn't take too long to figure it out. If anything, I wish it'd taken longer. Sheets stripped off the bed so violently the fitted one was all but shredded through one corner, multiple wet washcloths and a mostly-empty body wash bottle dripping in the tub, hand soap in the kitchen knocked into the sink, and a small pile of used cotton swabs on the coffee table near the camera lenses and a dish of rubbing alcohol. The ones near the bottom were covered in a thin layer of grunge and even a few small chunks of dirt, but toward the top they started looking cleaner, even unused. Dale isn't quite what you might call a neat freak, but the level of chaos he'd created apparently trying to get clean would drive him crazy under any other circumstances.

I picked up the bathroom and tossed the top bedsheet in the washer with the blankets on the floor. The bottom sheet was a total loss, but it was plain white—nothing that couldn't be easily replaced from another set.

Then I headed back to the living room and tried to wake him. It took a couple tries, but when I finally got him awake he looked up at me like he couldn't figure out who I was. Eventually he blinked a couple of times and shook his head.

“Nate?”

“Hey.” I thought about giving him the tough-love speech and then decided he looked like he'd already been through enough for one day. “Let's get this one out of the way first, how much did you have to drink?”

He looked embarrassed. And also at least mostly sober. “I don't know.”

“Any clue what time it is?”

He shook his head. I sat down next to him, and he immediately put his head down and squeezed his eyes shut.

The danger of trying to move Dale anywhere is, he's literally almost twice my size—he's got a whole foot and over a hundred pounds on me. I've actually knocked myself over a couple of times doing things like trying to help him off the floor or pulling him off a stool. I almost did it again pulling his head onto my shoulder, but at the last possible second he realized we were going to topple over like a pair of very mismatched dominoes and grabbed the couch cushion to stop himself.

And then he started crying. I knew it was coming. I just wrapped my arms around him and let him go. He'd done the same thing for me the day before, but with more snot. I'm a really ugly crier, but Dale is the kind who's mostly quiet and ends up with a case of the hiccups. I kind of wished there was a blanket on the sofa I could put around him—I can get totally lost in one of Dale's hugs, but for the reverse, I need a little help. So instead I just squeezed as hard as I could and stroked his hair and let him hold on. And thumped his back a couple times when the hiccups started, because sometimes that helps.

“You need to talk?”

Dale shook his head. “You shouldn't have to clean up my bullshit.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “I'm sorry, are we both still speaking English? I don't think I asked if you need maid service.”

He almost laughed, but it got lost in another hiccup and shower of tears. Then he shook his head again. “This is my fault. You've got enough without dealing with my—”

I have no idea the last time Dale heard anybody call him by his full name, but it's been long enough it actually made him stop and stare at me.

“Seriously, Dale, I'm not here for the self-flagellation. You're allowed to feel like shit happened to you, _because it did._ I'm not the only one involved here. I'm going to ask this one more time and I'd appreciate an answer this time, do you need to talk?”

He swiped at his eyes. I found a box of kleenex on the end table and passed it to him.

“I thought I knew just how much shit I put you through. I was almost ready to really get down to understanding it. Seeing it the way it looked through your eyes. Trying . . . trying to find a way to make it right. And then . . . then there was just, just all this fucking _other_ shit, and that's my fault too. And I didn't know. I didn't know.” He squeezed his hands together, and I took one before he could cut himself on his own fingernails. “I know why he was after you now. I can't tell you why.” He stopped long enough to blow his nose and throw out the tissue. “But this had nothing to do with you and he had to drag you into it anyway.”

“You didn't see that room. I wasn't the only one he stalked. All the pretenders—”

Dale shook his head and tapped the table in front of the lenses. “This? This wasn't about you. This was entirely about me. You were his collateral damage.”

“Why?”

“I can't tell you,” he whispered, and I just hugged him again. What else can you do, in a fucked-up situation like this?

After a few seconds he started patting my arms. “Nate. I can't breathe.”

I let go. “Sorry.”

This time he really did laugh. It was watery, but it was real. “Absolutely nobody looking at you would believe you could squeeze a man to death.”

“Just part of my natural charm. Have you eaten?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I pulled out some of your spaghetti sauce.” He pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Thanks for checking on me.”

“Thank you for yesterday.” He kind of gave me this confused look. “For being my friend.” I started laughing a little. I couldn't help it. “My fucked up, what the hell are we doing, this should never work friend.”

He laughed back the same way. “Thanks for letting me be your friend. Even after everything.”

I squeezed his hand. He squeezed back. “Are you gonna be okay by yourself?”

He nodded and gestured toward the lenses. “I was going to clean this stuff up, and I . . . ” He shrugged. “I don't know what happened exactly. I remember looking down at my fingers and seeing this black crap on my fingertips, probably mold, and going to the kitchen to wash it off, and then I just . . . ” He shrugged again.

“Snapped.”

“Yeah.” He looked down at his hands like the stuff that'd rubbed off on them, dirt or mold or maybe a certain somebody's spit, was still there. "I must've washed my hands a dozen times and I still felt like they wouldn't come clean."

“Do you need help making the bed?”

“No.” He looked vaguely ashamed, and I reached for his hands again to cup them between mine the best I could. “Not sure I want to sleep in there tonight.”

My phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket and saw a text from Darius. I was going to send something back, like _give me a few minutes_ , but Dale spotted the name and gave me this kind of sad smile.

“Your ride?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded. “I'll let you go. I've put you through enough for the night.”

“You'd do the same for me, don't lie.” Already had, actually, but I wasn't going to bring it up again. Instead I got up. He grabbed my hand.

“Hey, Nate?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. For being my friend.”

I squeezed his hand one more time. “Thanks for letting me.”

Darius had something new playing when I got back in the car—some girl whose name showed up on the digital display as Billie Eilish. He glanced over at me.

“Everything okay?”

“As okay as it can be, everything considered.”

He nodded. “Hey, listen. I know it's late, but do you want to grab a burger or something before I take you to get your car?”

“Yeah, that'd be good. I had an early break today.”

We stopped at Denny's, because it was the only thing open, and swapped concert stories over cheeseburgers. He told me about going to see someone named Ariana Grande and the absolutely mortifying ordeal of her mistaking him for a child instead of a teenager, because she was his first major crush but he didn't actually get his first big growth spurt until he was 15. I told him about going to see My Chemical Romance and deliberately wearing the shirt I bought at the concert when I asked Gerard Way to sign it just so I could get him to touch me, because I was seventeen and trying to cram an entire replacement teenagehood into a couple of months. He laughed and called me cringey. I rolled my eyes and told him he was whack. Then he told me nobody says whack anymore, and I told him it's not my fault people don't know how to speak proper English, and we both cracked up.

He ended up dropping me at Leah's instead of back at the park. The good thing about Denny's is, they're open 24 hours, and if you lose track of time talking, you don't get kicked out. The bad thing about Denny's is, they're open 24 hours, and if you lose track of time talking, absolutely nobody is going to tell you it's one in the morning. I'd barely gotten out of the car when I got a text and heard a chime behind me. Darius pulled out his phone.

It was Dale, in the employee chat: _seriously, 32 messages? Bill collectors don't call that much._

Maxine shot right back. _Maybe if you'd pick up so we didn't have to worry if somebody finally put a hit on you._

I sent him a series of raindrops emojis with a phone—cry me a river and answer next time, basically—and immediately heard Darius start laughing behind me and saw three different _NATHAN NO_ texts come in all at the same time. There was a significant pause in the chat while I tried to demand Darius explain the joke. Then Dale texted again.

_I'm going to do you the favor of assuming you have no idea what that's used for, and ignoring it._

Darius finally got himself under control enough to explain before he headed out, laughing and shaking his head at me in his rearview.

I decided to be petty and answer Dale entirely in leetspeak.

Somehow, Mitchell was able to read it. Everyone else was mystified, though, and that was fine by me.

I got a separate, private text from Dale as I was opening the door.

_You okay?_

_Yeah. Just tired. You?_

_Hungover. It's been a few weeks, I thought I'd try it out again._

_And?_

_Not my best decision._ I saw the little dots on the bottom of the text window and waited. Two minutes passed, and then he sent me _I'll see you at work tomorrow._

I almost asked what he'd been typing all that time, but knowing Dale, I could go in circles for hours and never find out. Instead I said okay, and goodnight, and plugged my phone in and flopped on the mattress before texting Leah.

_Hey, you never told me what you wanted for lunch tomorrow and it's your turn._

I was almost asleep when she texted back _CREPES_ all in capital letters and then said goodnight.

So now I'm just trying to fall asleep. It's going to be a long time coming, I think. It's hard, feeling this way and knowing there's absolutely nothing you can do—no law to invoke, no warning you can give, not even a living face to punch.

I'm just going to have to hope it gets better.


	20. I'm Running Out Of Time

Before anything else, let's get this out of the way: I'm not fired.

I'm just suspended.

It sucks, but it's like Dale said: he's not going to play favorites with me, and I actually respect that more than I would him giving me the slack.

Although frankly, right now, me being suspended is the least of my worries.

I guess I should explain all that, huh?

Today didn't start out as a shitstorm. I brought soup and got to teach Madeleine a clapping game, because between Anne, Leah, and me, I was the only one who remembered most of the hand motions for a game all three of us called different things, but I grew up calling it “C.C. My Playmate” and that's what I'm sticking with. I only taught her the first three verses. Anne wanted to keep going with the one about the BB gun, but there's some things kids Madeleine's age just don't need. Maxine's been learning to make bread and brought a side for the soup, and Oliver decided he was going to get in on this and bring salad. Not to brag, but Casablanca doesn't have anything on us.

We sifted through some of the pictures from Warin's lair, picking out stuff Dale and Leah and I might want—the old family photos, the news articles, and Mitchell made this super-dramatic gagging noise and said “get a room” and frisbeed a photo at me of Dale and me sitting on one of the booths in the horror arcade—him making the stupidest, worst-acted “help I'm terrified” face in the world, me gnawing on his arm and trying to look menacing. There are some things that are permanently true, though, and one of them is that it's very hard to look menacing when you're nineteen and look like you're not old enough to drive without an adult.

I think it's the first time I've laughed over any of the photos we found down there. Anne looked at it and asked if this is why I said I bite when provoked, which is right around the point Dale walked in with our paychecks, since he knows where we all go before call now.

“I take it you told them about the mugger.”

The way this whole crew can just move in perfect unison without practicing it is a little eerie, honestly, especially when they all turn to look at me at the same time.

I showed him the picture and shrugged. “Okay, so there was like this special screening or something of this movie Dale wanted to see down in the park, and we decided to hang out for awhile after it was over, and when we were leaving this guy decided he was going to pull a knife on Dale and take his wallet, and when Dale said he didn't have it the guy called us faggots and pushed him and he went on his ass because he wasn't expecting it, and it pissed me off so I bit the asshole.”

I didn't understand the facial expressions I got back from this story, but they were pretty epic, including Anne just slowly going “ . . . you _bit_ him?”

“Look, his arm was in easy reach, okay.”

“Nathan sent him to the hospital,” Dale interjected. “He ended up needing eight stitches. And IV antibiotics.”

“Damn.” Darius kind of gave me this look like he was waiting to see if I was going to go on a cannibalism spree. Madeleine applauded. I shrugged again.

Teeth are a good weapon in a pinch, is all I'm saying. And it was a good morning.

In fact it kept being a really good day right up until about three o'clock. And then Maxine and Anne both walkied in at the same time with horror stories from Candyland.

Here's something you have to understand. We work with kids from babies to teenagers. Most of the time the teens kind of keep to themselves unless they're in horror, and the younger kids are pretty great. They can be a handful—they're sugared up and running around with _rides_ and _lights_ and _real actual princesses and cowboys_ , of course they're a handful—but they're a _fun_ handful, if you get me. They're there to have fun and they want us to make it fun. Sometimes you get accidentally smacked in the face by a kid doing an overenthusiastic photo pose or something, or you have to make up a fast excuse when a kid tries to hug you, but for the most part it's the kind of stuff you can laugh off and five minutes later you've forgotten all about it, unless it was particularly hilarious. Maxine has a lot of stories about kids bouncing off her hoop skirts. That kind of stuff.

But once in awhile, you get a kid who makes you wonder if the Wild Ones are secretly sending changelings to the park just to fuck with you.

The kid Candyland was calling about was one of those.

According to Maxine, he'd asked for a picture and then deliberately tried to look up her skirt, and pushed her over when she pulled it around her legs. And according to Anne, he'd tripped the mime on purpose.

According to both of them, his mom seemed to think it was hilarious. And he was headed for Twin Vale.

Mitchell nodded me back to Second and asked if there was any good way to put up the horses mid-day. He was worried—and as soon as he brought it up, so was I—the kid might deliberately run in front of the carriage, and while the horses are about as perfect as you can get, at least during the day, there was still the risk they wouldn't be able to stop in time.

We got the horses put up and agreed it'd be best to pull off our gunbelts, too. The props we carry are never loaded--except, very occasionally, with blanks--but they are real revolvers. And unlike modern guns that can use plastic for parts that don't get hot, these are made of nothing but metal and wood. A kid pulling one of those could do a lot of damage just by waving it around as a club.

Mitchell pulled out his utility knife and added it to the pile of stuff we were leaving in the breakroom. I thought about it for a couple of seconds and decided to leave my phone—Mitchell has one of those cases where you could do just about anything but light the thing on fire and it'd be safe, but I'm still trying to find one that does all that and fits my hand.

Seriously, screw being “petite” sometimes.

I pulled my flask off my belt and tossed that on the table, too. Mitchell took a giant swig from his and then did the same. And then we headed back into the park.

We both figured we might get hit, or pushed, but that'd be the end of it. Not pleasant, but not the end of the world. I had a kid in a wheelchair accidentally run over my foot at one point when he was pulling away from a photo, and that had to be worse than anything this kid could whip out on purpose.

I was most of the way back to the main plaza when I heard a kid yell “hey mom, that cowboy's black!”

I get that reaction a lot. Usually from Black kids who've never gotten to see a Black cowboy, actually. It's not even all that surprising to me. I probably would've done the same thing at their age. Once in awhile it's some incredibly sheltered white kid, and if I turn around fast enough I can see the exact moment their parent gets really embarrassed and realizes this kid really needs to get out more. Either way, Mitchell and I have an agreement—there's never even a hint I might be an outlaw when that phrase gets yelled, and since Mitchell's a sheriff, that means I'm usually on my own.

So I turned around to tip my hat to whatever kid was the shocked one of the day, and then hit my ass straight in the dirt.

Ah. Not just any kid. _The_ kid.

I opened my mouth to say something like “whoa there, partner, we don't do that kind of thing in Twin Vale,” but before I could he smacked me in the face.

So I tried getting to my feet instead, and got kicked in the leg hard enough to lose my balance, and then in the butt before I could try getting it again. I looked up hoping his mom might see somebody getting their ass beat by her kid and put a stop to it, but she was laughing and calling him “rambunctious.” Some lady who looked absolutely disgusted with the mom reached her hand out to help me to my feet, and I took it. I'd almost gotten my balance when the kid jumped on my back, and I went down face-first.

So I rolled before the kid could get out of distance again and grabbed his arm.

“You,” I told him, “are damn lucky you're not my kid.”

Apparently, this was enough for the mom to start screaming bloody murder. By then Mitchell was already headed in my direction at a run, yelling something into the walkie. I let go of the kid and kind of staggered to my feet, ready to go meet Mitchell, and got knocked to my knees _again._ I managed to get up, ready to call Gary and ask him to send park security, but before I could get my walkie the mom screamed at me to turn around, and when I did she had a taser pointed straight at my chest.

I decided it'd probably be better to raise my hands than grab the walkie. “Ma'am, I would _seriously_ appreciate if you'd put that thing away and tell your son to stop hitting me.”

“He's a _child_ , and you _assaulted_ him—”

“Ma'am, that's a weapon and there's a crowd around here—”

I saw her click the deployment button.

And then the taser hit the ground, and the mom was holding her hand and screaming, and Leah—who wasn't even remotely smiling—stepped out between the buildings, her whip in her hand.

“You could've killed him, you dumb bitch,” she said, and there was something about both her tone and her language—I've never head Leah say bitch, not even jokingly—that made me take a closer look at her.

Her eyes didn't look like Leah at all.

I wasn't paying attention to whatever bullshit the mom was screaming—or her kid, who was actually cheering for Leah. Not in some cute wholesome _wow I can't believe you hit that right out of her hand_ way, either. Nice family. I didn't really care, though. I was more interested in finding the nearest post to sag against before I hit the ground again for reasons totally unrelated to being hit by a kid.

And that was about when Dale came running up. I was pretty sure he'd actually run the whole way, too—there was a patch of sweat between his shoulderblades and his face was red.

“What in _hell_ is going on here?”

I just shook my head. Leah was looking down at her whip like a wind-up toy that lost all its steam. Mitchell was the one who spoke up.

“Kid knocked Nathan down and started beating the crap out of him, boss. Lady tried to tase him and Leah hit it out of her hand.”

“He didn't even yell,” the kid said. He sounded disappointed. “I thought he'd yell.”

Dale looked at the mom. “Is that what happened?”

She started wailing about how I threatened her son, and she thought I was going to break his arm, and what kind of place was Dale running, anyway, the lady in the Candyland section got upset because he gave one of the actors a little push, too, and we should all be used to it by now, and that bitch with the whip could have killed her. On and on. You know the type, probably, if you work retail or you're around little kids ever. Although this kid wasn't exactly little. He had to be at least ten or eleven.

“That isn't what happened,” said the lady who'd helped me up. “That young man—” she pointed at Mitchell—“had it right.”

“I got it on video,” said this kid I hadn't even noticed before. He looked like he was maybe fifteen or sixteen, with a faceful of metal and a gravity-defying green haircut. Dale sighed and shook his head.

“Leah, Nathan, my office. Mitchell, if you wouldn't mind. Stop in Candyland on the way. See who made the complaint over there.”

“Both of the girls called over here, boss.”

“All right. Tell them they're wanted at the front.” He turned to the kid with the piercings. “Don't suppose you could send me that video.”

I was about to head to the front when I realized Leah was still standing there. I reached out and grabbed her elbow. She shook her head and looked at me, confused.

“Nathan?”

“We've got to go to the office.”

And then she said something that almost made me stop breathing.

“Why am I in Twin Vale?”

I never knew that stupid suspense-novel line about your blood turning to ice in your veins could be a real feeling, but I got to experience it firsthand while I led her up to the office. We were met by Anne, Maxine, and Mitchell. And then we just waited, while Mitchell explained to the girls why Leah was there. Leah kept shaking her head, looking mortified.

“I'd never use the whip on somebody, I hit myself a couple times when I was learning to use it and it hurt like crazy, I _wouldn't_. I would've gotten between you first.”

“We'll be talking about that.” Dale, getting off the maintenance go-kart. “Leah, if you didn't have to stay here I'd be sending you home right now. I want to hear from all of you. Separately. What happened here.”

Mitchell went first. I just sat on the bench outside Dale's office. I could feel a bruise growing on my leg. Probably another one on my tailbone, too. That kid had to take karate. At some point Mitchell came out and Maxine went in, and while she was in I saw the mom and her kid, both still screaming, getting escorted out by security. If looks could kill, that mom would've sent me to the morgue with or without her taser.

Anne went faster. She'd basically gotten the mime to his feet and hightailed it away from the kid before he could give Moth a reason to introduce him to his own insides by way of vivisection. Then Leah and I got called in.

Leah started . . . I don't want to say babbling, but she was definitely talking fast, and all in a panic, before I could even open my mouth.

“Dale, Mitchell said I _whipped somebody_ , I don't remember, I don't even remember going to Twin Vale, I'd just put Mr. Scratch away and I was going to the roller coasters and then Nathan was talking to me _I don't remember—”_

And then she started crying. Not a little bit, either. In between sobs I kept hearing her hiccup out “I don't remember” again and again. Dale sighed and caught my eyes over her head. We both knew. It's just neither of us wanted to say it.

“All right,” he said, and if words were rocks you'd think he was lifting Mount Rushmore by himself. “Nathan, see if Maxine's still out there. If she is have her take Leah up to the castle.”

She was. I hugged Leah, and kissed her forehead. I was pretty sure at that point I was kissing her goodbye, and I was trying not to start bawling myself. Dale waited until the door was closed behind her before nodding at me to sit down.

“You're damned lucky there's video, Nathan, or I'd have to tell you to go get your things.”

I just blinked at him. I was expecting the last four words of that sentence, but not what came before it. Dale sighed again.

“Look. I understand your reaction. I really do. But you _can't_ touch park guests. You can't. That isn't just a rule. It's a way to keep you out of trouble with the law.”

“So if I'm not fired, how much do I have to worry about?”

“Well, tasers are prohibited on park grounds, and we have two videos of her son assaulting you, one from another parkgoer and one from a security camera. And two people gave me their contact information in case she decides to press charges. Right now the question is whether she's willing to risk her own testimony getting turned around on her and landing her and her son in hot water. As for what you have to worry about from my end, you're not fired, but I can't turn a blind eye even though there were extenuating circumstances. If you'd only acted in self-defense, you'd be fine. But you grabbing the kid when he wasn't touching you is a problem, and I have to suspend you.”

“How long?”

“Three days. You won't be allowed on park grounds. I'll make sure Leah's taken care of while you're out.”

“What's going to happen to her?”

Dale looked bleak. “I'll give her the option if she wants to self-suspend or go back into the park. But if she's already losing her memory? Nate . . . ” He met my eyes, and I saw tears standing in the corners of his. “She might be gone.”

I remember shaking my head at him, and telling him she wasn't, but I couldn't tell you how he answered me if you paid me. I know we went around about it for a couple of minutes. Finally he just shook his head at me.

“I've got to send you off. Do you want me to send Gary after your things or do you want me to walk you back?”

I didn't think I could face Twin Vale, so I asked if Gary could get my phone and my flask. Dale called him on the park phone. Then he hugged me.

“You'll be back in three days,” he said, but we both knew he was saying it because he couldn't say “she'll be okay,” and somehow that made it worse.

He filled out my suspension paperwork while Gary got my stuff out of the breakroom. I signed it and got up.

“Hey, Dale?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks. For not firing me.”

“Don't do it again. I'm pretty sure the other actors would mutiny if I fired you over something like this, but some sue-happy parent would have a field day with your file if you turned up doing it over and over again. If something like this happens again, you do whatever you have to do to get away, but you don't engage. You're not going to get in trouble for breaking character to call for help.”

“Okay.”

I've spent most of the night going over the park documents Dale gave me. I called Leah earlier, and she told me she took the suspension option. She sounded depressed as hell. I pulled the other actors and Dale into a group chat and asked if someone could take her some food if I cooked so she wouldn't have to eat in the restaurants while I was away if she didn't want to. There's some pretty great food in the park, but it can get old if you eat it all the time, and also I had the feeling losing access to food from home while we were both suspended would just make it worse for her.

Mitchell's car is still out of commission—I'm starting to think he'd be better off just getting a new one, I was around for this particular blowout and when his electrical system went all at once it was _nasty—_ and Anne doesn't drive, but everybody else volunteered. Leah's place is on the way to the park from both Dale's and Maxine's, so they're picking up for her, and if either can't make it Oliver spoke up as backup.

I really wish I knew what to do.


End file.
